Tsunami warning

I was just watching CNN's Tsunami coverage, they were reporting from the deck of an Indian
Hospital ship, and interviewing some government officials who were preening about 11 ships of the Indian Navy helping Sri Lanka. Maybe I'm over-sensitive to media bias, and the general anti-US slant worldwide and in the news, but they sure seemed to be implying we should have more ships than India over there (we probably do). As if India is projecting it's might around the world, instead of across a narrow straight to ceylon.

I'm sure the next big news story will be how the US didn't set up a Tsunami warning system to provide warnings to the people of the Indian ocean. There will be much gavel banging as people demand to know why they weren't protected, and why the US didn't do it's job as world fireman as well as world policeman. (I guess we'll soon have all the crappy world jobs, world building-code inspector, world garbageman, etc)

In hindsight it would have been cheaper for the US to have set up the whole warning system of sensors and buoys, along with the phone networks to be able to call people and warn them, along with the power grids to power all this. At least then in our role as world electric company we could send someone a bill. [Nigeria: "Honey, didn't we pay that fucking cable bill this month, the US has sent another one?" Dials. "You've reached the US, your call is important to us, please choose one of the following options. You've been attacked press one. Dictator problems press two, natural disaster press three, if you feel you've been unjustly cruise missiled, press four."]

The whole situation is horrifying enough, with so many dead, that you'd think that there wouldn't have been an immediate leap to make political hay out of it, with UN people calling us stingy, and various people sniping at the president. Who are these people? Why are we giving them money? The US should spend the money for a quadruple wide mobile home that the UN can use as a headquarters, to be parked wherever the trouble is greatest in the world.
Good luck to them and good riddance.

Maybe that will be the final warning this Tsunami will give us. The UN is just a layer of Bureacracy that soaks up money, provides little service and much anti-US invective. It is time for the UN to be set free to go somewhere else and do good.

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