"Can't Stand the Heat?" - WP Editorial Will PISS YOU OFF - please email

[hatrack]

No, I am not making this up.

Can't Stand the Heat?
Thursday, August 14, 2003; Page A18

"To listen to the fuss Europeans are making about their weather, anyone would think that it was actually hot over there.

EDIT

Okay, so maybe it's a bit warmer than usual . . . But is this really hot -- hot enough to close businesses, hot enough to cancel trains (the tracks might buckle) . . .?

EDIT

Not all Europeans may want to go this far -- but maybe they will not at least stop turning up their noses at those American summer inventions they've long loved to mock: The office window that doesn't open, the air conditioner that produces sub-arctic temperatures and the tall glass of water, served in a restaurant, filled to the brim with ice."

EDIT/END

That's right, 3,000-plus dead in France alone, most of them old poor people, and what better time than now to derive hearty chuckles from that fact, while zinging them wicked Frenchies for failing to serve ice water and crank up the AC?

FUCKING REPTILIAN SONS-OF-BITCHES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You can contact these slime-molds in human guise by e-mail at [e-mail], if you're so inclined.

Original Editorial

[glitch]

1. ignorant and ugly from the WP editorial board

How embarassing for them, if they could only see it.

[Skittles]

2. hatrack, did you see all the letters

at www.mediawhoresonline.com

they are very good

[MountainLaurel]

3. A little LTTE followup

From Saturday's Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1251-2003Aug15.html

Kudos to your editorial board for its insightful, relevant and compassionate piece on the deadly heat wave currently ravaging Europe. As a native midwesterner, I sincerely hope that your paper sees fit to run a similar piece the next time a record-breaking winter storm strikes south of the Mason-Dixon line, killing hundreds of elderly Americans in their homes, causing massive disruption to business and transportation and bringing soul-smothering misery to the daily lives of millions.

Perhaps that would teach 'em not to mock our parkas and studded tires quite so much.

-- Tom Darby

[wellst0nev0ter]

4. Twats

eom

[Capt_Nemo]

5. I will forward this to every right wing european idiot I know

Just to illustrate how high the US establishment regards
them along with all of us.

I hereby thank the Washington Post for making clear my point for
all the US sycophants I know.

[alcuno]

6. I sent one.

Is this how the Post reacted when 500 people died during the Chicago heatwave?

[chiburb]

7. Chicago was over 700 deaths...

Snip:
Question: How many people died as a result of the heat wave?

Klinenberg: In 1995 there were no uniform standards for determining a "heat related death," so officials had to develop them. Edmund Donoghue, Cook County's chief medical examiner, used state-of-the-art criteria to report 465 heat-related deaths for the heat wave week and 521 heat deaths for the month of July. But Mayor Richard M. Daley challenged these findings. "It's hot," the mayor told the media. "But let's not blow it out of proportion. . . . Every day people die of natural causes. You cannot claim that everybody who has died in the last eight or nine days dies of heat. Then everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat." Many local journalists shared Daley's skepticism, and before long the city was mired in a callous debate over whether the so-called heat deaths were—to use the term that recurred at the time—"really real."

Medical examiners around the country confirmed that Donoghue's heat-related death criteria were scientifically sound and endorsed his findings. But perhaps the best measure of heat deaths comes from another figure—the "excess death" rate—which counts the difference between the reported deaths and the typical deaths for a given time period. According to this measure, 739 Chicagoans above the norm died during the week of 14 to 20 July—which means that Donoghue had been conservative in his accounts.

Daley's skepticism had a big impact on the public debate, and it still does. Today if you ask Chicagoans about the heat wave they will likely tell you that not all the deaths were "really real." That's a direct legacy of the politics of the disaster.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/443213in.html