One billion minutes to Jesus and one billon dollars to the Big Easy
The e-mail begins with an illuminating perspective of the number one billion.
“A billion seconds ago it was 1959.”
According to the Google calculator, one year equals 31,556,926 seconds, so a billion seconds was almost 32 years ago, or 1976.
“A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.”
According to Google, one year equals 525,949 minutes, so a billion minutes would take us back 1,901 years into the mists of history, which would drop us into 106 A.D., back when Trajan conquered Dacia.
No, I don’t know what that means, but Jesus was tossing moneylenders from the temple about one billion and 72 million minutes ago. Small change, really.
“A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.”
According to Google, one year equals about 8,766 hours, about 10,000 years before Jesus, so this figure is accurate.
“A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.”
There’s no real way to ascertain the validity of that statement, but it sure sounds plausible. We’re dumping about a billion into Iraq every three or four days, according to the National Priorities Project.
The e-mail then makes an incredible leap of faith — Jesus was likely not a part of this series of calculations — by saying, “While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let’s take a look at New Orleans It’s amazing what you can learn with some simple division Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking the Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans.”
Punctuation aside, this statement is false.
According to the Washington Post, Senator Landrieu’s proposal, which was put together with Sen. David Ritter (R), asked for $250 billion for the Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief and Economic Recovery Act, which would create the “Pelican Commission” (Protecting Essential Louisiana Infrastructure, Citizens and Nature) controlled by Louisiana residents.
That story ran on September 26, 2005, a month after Katrina.
In fact, according to Senator Landrieu’s Web site last week, “Louisiana may once again turn to Congress for hurricane recovery money, this time to pay for the state’s $1.5 billion share of boosting hurricane protection around New Orleans.”
Traditionally, the federal government pays 65 percent while state governments pick up 35 percent, the site said. The 2009 budget for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers includes $7.3 billion to repair, restore and bulk up hurricane protection in the New Orleans area.
The popular illusion that everything Katrina is all about New Orleans, coupled with the popular misconception that all New Orleans residents are poor and on the take, leads to stupendous statements such as the e-mail’s “if you are one of 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman, child), you each get $516,528.00.”
According to the census bureau, the population of New Orleans dropped from 496,938 to 223,388 after Katrina. It will balloon to 272,000 by late this year, according to the Rand Corporation.
Without New Orleans, farmers in the Midwest won’t be shipping out their grain to the world and Detroit won’t have the raw materials to build your American car.
That’s according to a New Orleans resident who pays attention to her city.
There’s money earmarked to help rebuild the infrastructure so that the rest of America can hit Mardi Gras and other “party events” for which New Orleans is famous, leaving their trash behind for the city to clean up.
According to the Clorox Company, more than 1.2 million Glad bags were donated to post-Katrina cleanup, in part so that local grassroots organization Katrina Krewe could remove 250,000 tons of debris so that Mardi Gras could continue its annual output of over 2,00 tons of tourista trash.
According to my calculator, 250,000 tons is 80 percent of a billion ounces, or about 200 million Quarter Pounders with cheese.
But Landrieu and Ritter and the rest were talking about rebuilding the Gulf Coast, not just New Orleans. According to the Post, the Landrieu bill included funds to study several key flood-protection projects, as well as a $14 billion ecosystem restoration for Louisiana’s vanishing coastal marshes, which help protect vulnerable communities against storm surges.
Other potential projects include a 50-year-old plan for a $750 million lock for the New Orleans Industrial Canal, $50 billion in open-ended grants for storm-ravaged communities and $13 billion for the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, along with mortgage assistance, health care, substance abuse treatment and other services for hurricane victims. It also includes payments to hospitals, ports, banks, shipbuilders, fishermen and schools, as well as $8 million for alligator farms, $35 million for seafood industry marketing, and $25 million for a sugar-cane research laboratory that had not been completed before Katrina.
There are billions of e-mail forwards out there that promote nonfactual information and we need to trash them all.
That’s according to me.
Tags: Food, google