Christmas Tsunami: The Worst Ever
The New York Times' multimedia coverage is excellent
BBC's coverage is the most extensive, with many eyewitness accounts

This quake is continuing... ... as of Jan 1st, with 5.x and 6.x events happening hourly.

It is now thought over 100,000 died in Sumatra alone, the last area to be reached by rescuers.
Below, before and after satellite images of part of Bandar Aceh.

(click for enlargements)
Here is an amateur video of Bandar Aceh being engulfed; and this BBC clip, of the dead floating in the debris in Sumatra.

If you are looking for news about friends, try these links:
Missing in Thailand / Sri Lanka / India / Indonesia / Maldives

Google has up a directory of relief agencies which can take donations.

This first-hand account comes from a friend in Thailand:

Dear Friends,
I am finally calming down after this extremely shocking global catastrophe. Please forward this on to anyone who is not on this list, internet is difficult here and I apologize to anyone who is not this list.
You have to imagine what the Andaman sea is like: calm, beautiful, blue and virtually waveless, in fact almost silent, more like a lake than a sea. On Christmas we did a four-island snorkle trip and it was gorgeous. Our group of friends and family had a blast. Sunny, Leslie, Julia, Suzette, Colleen, and the teenagers, Sahwa, Jamine, Raliegh, and Dylan.

Next day, around eight oclock in the morning I was lying in bed when I felt an earthquake. It was so strange because it went on for almost for five minutes or more. After about three minutes I said to Colleen,"This can't be an earthquake, a worker must be doing something to our bungalow." I even got up and went outside to look and then decided it really was an earthquake and thought maybe Tokyo got hit.

A few minutes later I reached Michael in by cell phone and was telling him how safe I felt snorkeling and that I hoped we would come here together and rent a boat and sail around, I forgot to mention the earthquake and wished I had as he would have advised us to get to higher ground.

We asked Julia and Suzette if they felt it and they said no. About forty five minutes later Suzette came running over to our bungalow saying there was a surf wave coming down the beach and we should hurry up and come and see it. My first response was tsunami! We are having a tsunami- lets get moving and grab our stuff. Suzette and Julia and Sunny and Leslie had beachfront bungalows, so we all ran out to see the ocean retreating and coming in but the waves were small, the first one almost reached the bungalow but was very shallow, the second time it was a bit bigger, by then we were scrambling, waking the kids up and getting them to help.. The third wave came in and splashed over the steps, the next one crashed against the door with Suzette inside. By this point it was clear we really had to move and fast. Sunny and Leslie were on the other side of a small river and could not get back over. The kids were up but clearly did not understand the scope of what was happening and although we knew it was dangerous we could never have imagined how huge this cataclysm was going to be.

Forget our stuff just save our lives! I was saying. I looked out and saw the ocean suck out and this wave started to form a couple of hundred feet out and it just got bigger and bigger. My heart stopped and I stood there saying Oh My God!

The locals who had all been stunned and confused, as they had never seen anything like this, looked horrified and so did we. We all started screaming run! run!.

I had no idea how big this wave would get as it was still growing when I turned my back and started running. I had a cell phone and reached Michaels message service telling him what was happening and to go on line and find out what was happening and how long it would go on to. I am afraid it was a terrifying message to receive . I was describing to him this twenty foot wave that was bearing down on us and we were running for our lives. My worst nightmare was coming true like a bad movie and then we were cut off.

I was praying please dont let this wave just roll over us, please let it stop, let it break behind us and let us survive. I turned around once and saw the wave breaking between the trees and the two bungalows and just kept running knowing the water could still knock us down. We reached the resort reception area and people were in shock. And we all knew we were really still not safe.

At that point we ran back to our bungalows and grabbed our passports and money and fled towards the highway. Julia, Colleen and Jasmine and I were now seperated from the Suzette, Sashwa, Dylan Raliegh , Sunny and Leslie. Jasmine last saw Sahswa grabing the camera and saying he was goiing to get photos of it! we knew another one coming for sure.

The locals were all saying go go go. We headed towards the highway and waited and waited. Local Thai people were picking people up and heading up into the mountains. A pick up came by and they said get in and we jumped into the truck and they took us up into a rubber tree plantation. We were all freaking out about the rest of us not being there. We ended up driving a bit further to a nice house and about fifty of us were there like refugees, Some injured, some in bathing suits, no shoes, some separated from family, children, loved ones. From the house we could see the ocean and the water sucking out again. We now knew it was a huge quake in Indonesia. One English man was on our beach and he was tossed out of a boat, he was badly cut all over and he said seven people on the boat died. He saw his wife and baby on shore as the wave swept thru. He was in shock. Another woman down the beach from our place said she was in her bungalow and held onto the pole in the bathroon as the wave came thru and destroyed her place, miraculously she was left uninjured. The bungalow next door to hers had a wooden long boat crashed on top of it. It was occuppied by a couple with an infant. They were not in the cabin and had made it up on the mountain with the rest of us.

Rumors flew around. more waves, more aftershocks, ferrys sunk, divers lost, resorts gone. We were worrying about the others did they make it? Colleen and Jasmine and I decided to walk down to wear we heard there was another refugee camp. The Thai people had already showed up in truck with food and beer, donation only. They were so kind!

We got a lift over to the elephant camp where many people had fled too, hoping our friends would be there and sure enough- cheers and tears and hugs... they had made it too!

Towards evening we decided to go back and get our stuff, hopefully, and seek accommodations somewhere up higher. We went back to the demolished bungalows on the beach front and found some of our stuffed stashed in our place. Suzette and Sunny and Leslie were so lucky this did not happen in the middle of the night.

I was riding inside the pickup talking to the driver who was trying to find us a place up high to stay and I asked him if he was Buddhist or Muslim. He said Muslim. He asked me where I was from I said America. He said America hates us. It broke my heart, here was this man risking his own life to help us and thinking we hated him. How do you explain this all in broken language? I did my best with a very pained heart. We ended up at the most expensive place on the island and got to watch BBC and begin to grasp the scope of this disaster. We knew we were in the biggest natural disaster possibly ever. The stories came in from all around us of death and miraculous escapes, lost children, husbands, wives.

We were all humbled and as the night went on and over the next day to realize that 'there but for the grace God go I'.

Before leaving we gathered on the beach and did a ceremony and prayers for all and the spirits of all those who left, the rich, the poor, the royal grandson, the animals, the children.....

Today we took a speed boat back to the mainland to fly back to Bangkok. There we saw our fellow travelers bandaged, injured, wheel chairs, greiving.. It was very shocking and very emotional. We are all still in shock I think. In Bangkok as we exited customs all the embassies were there, so many countries looking for their people and doctors and nurses were there to help people. It was again very emotional for all of us.

The Thai people we were with are mainly Muslim. They were kind, generous and literally risked their lives to help us. As I watch the news and realize the enormity of what we went through I can only thank the Fates and our guardian spirits. It is hard to face how some die and others live and that all of us escaped uninjured when so many died around us. We are so thankful to be together, to have lost none of the kids or one another. This kind of tragedy simply breaks one's heart open to life and how fragile we all are. How can we wage war on another becomes even more impossible to contemplate. My love to all of you and I give thanks for the protection that surrounded us.
Adele

And there's this:
LONDON: A 10-year-old British schoolgirl saved the lives of hundreds of people in southern Asia by warning them a wall of water was about to strike, after learning about tsunamis in geography class... (article)

Divorce would be nice. Blue states could even join the EEC. Red states could pound their bibles all they want. I wouldn't mind.... Except I'd have to move- I'm a blue in a red state. Seems that some Reds are thinking along similar lines:

"ChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government."



The 49% to the world: Sorry Everybody!

Check out the Canadian Alternative

From the Reality-Based Autonomous Zone...

The pentagon has now as much as admitted that the anti-war arguments against Iraq have all poved true. A little late. Read the report.

Major Tin Ear
Especially since Rumsfeld's callous replies to the troops in Kuwait, we've heard pundits say a hundred times, 'no-one could have expected the resistance to develop with the techniques that it did...' Hello? No-one? Maybe no-one who had the privelege of the president's well-protected ear, or Rummy's. But the alarums were loud and clear. Besides, how bright does one need to be to guess that occupying heavily-armed Arab Muslim Iraq with thousands of even more heavily armed and very edgy American 20-year olds with orders to shoot, yelling in English, killing families at roadblocks and rousting innocents from their homes at night to send to Abu Gharaib, how much does it take to guess there'd be some kind of resistance, and that the resistance would grow if the "liberation" became an occupation? And in a country littered with abandoned munitions, where full engagement with air-supported US forces would be folly, how long would it take before insurgents began 'improvising' explosive 'devices' from these munitions, and setting them in the road in wait for an American convoy speeding from one insecure location to another. "IEDs" hitting unarmored humvees have produced more than half the US casualtes. What is wrong with our "planners"? Remember these are the same people who after 911 said "no-one had ever imagined" crashing planes into tall buildings... which of course, as it turned out, was utter nonsense.

Whoever wins the Iraqi election, to have any credibility with the citizenry, will have to ask the Americans to remove their troops. To stay beyond that would invite worse disaster. And what of the neo-con dreams of a beachhead in the middle east? We'll be essentially turning Iraq over to Shiia majority rule on January 30. I think the best we can hope for now is a more or less stable Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. Shiite Iran will inevitably play a big role in Iraq's evolution, and will want to manage this closely, having already fought a long and bloody war with Saddam in the 80's. The best thing America could do would be to get on a new track with Iran, aimed at a constructive relationship with an eventually nuclear Iran, neutral at least, if not friendly to the US, and where Iran is a force for stability in the mideast and west asia. There are obstacles, not least the mythic anti-americanism of the still-ruling-though-dwindling Iranian Revolution, but in the long run, Iran is the best bet we have for a major partner for regional stability. Re-opening relations with Iran at this point would be akin to Nixon's opening to China, and it could be as big a key to a flexible pursuit of long term regional stability as the China opening was to the denouement of the Cold War. I'm not sure we can count on that degree of forsight at the present time, but there are no good alternatives, so we may end up there like it or not.

Meanwhile, the dollar .... The US borrows over 2 billion dollars a day from foreign sources to finance it's "we reserve the right to invade and occupy any country we feel threatened by" military establishment, the most expensive in the world- more in fact, than all the others combined. Under the circumstances, it didn't take long to dawn on the rest of the world that sponsoring such enormous asymmetry of power was no longer in their interests... Best course for them would seem to be gradual disinvestment so as to bring the Goliath back in line with the other nations of the world... and that is what we are seeing now. In the short term, a reduced dollar will reduce the american current accounts deficit, which will seem like a good thing; the value of US debt would also diminish, however this may spur rapid disinvestment, which would be a disaster. America could raise interest rates to attract rate-hungry foreigners to T-Bills again, but this might cause a bankruptcy crisis in America, where people are overloaded in debt. Story ongoing...

Bill Moyers has left PBS' Now. We'll surely miss him. Here is his powerful final statement, on the press and our democracy.

Here is an interesting piece: Empires Prefer a Baby and the Cross to the Adult Jesus by Giles Fraser,The Guardian U.K.

A US Army historian concludes "The U.S. military invaded Iraq without a formal plan for occupying and stabilizing the country and this high-level failure continues to undercut what has been a "mediocre" Army effort there..."

Cato Institute: Exiting Iraq: Why the U.S. Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War against Al Qaeda
(Report of a Special Task Force Sponsored by the Cato Institute.)

Must read: The War Bin Laden Wanted
We have argued since March of 2003 that declaring a "war" on "terror", and then recklessly invading and occupying Iraq was just the sort of reaction AlQaida might have hoped for with their 911 attacks. In "The War Bin Laden Wanted", Paul Schroeder patiently and carefully makes this argument in the current issue of "The American Conservative". -read his analysis here-

Our previous pieces re Iraq Occupation are still pertinent:
April 2004: Iraq- A Bad Idea Gets Worse ... March 2004: Truth or Consequences ... June 2003: Quicksand ... May 2003: Bait Taken ... April 2003: Hot Potato

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