One thing that everybody ought to understand about the   disastrous storm in Burma is that it was a hurricane--a powerful hurricane, which drove a destructive storm surge of ocean water up through the Burmese delta lowlands, pretty much exactly as hurricane Katrina did in the Louisiana/Mississippi delta in 2005. So that's what we're talking about.
 
Why do all the MSM call this killer storm a cyclone? Well, a bit unbelievably, they persist even in 2008 with a centuries old Euro-American tradition of imperialistic, ethnocentric deceptiveness and mystification.

The generic meteorological term for this type of storm is a tropical cyclone. However, that's not a term widely used outside of scientific circles. Going back to the days of the British empire, Euro-American cultural elites have long used a version of a word found in Asian languages from Chinese to Urdu, picked up by European sailors and colonial officials in Asia, "typhoon," to describe these storms when they occur in the northwestern Pacific. "Cyclone" was designated the term for the southern Pacific and Indian Ocean colonial zones; "hurricane," from a Caribbean storm god, for storms in the colonial Atlantic.

They're all the same thing; bizarrely, the three different names represent, basically, the racializing of tropical storms. They're wog storms--all colored people and their storms in their proper place.

And the American MSM persist with this bit of imperial double-talk  today--confusing readers, and blocking empathy, solidarity, effective response. Southern Burma is now experiencing its own Katrina--but even worse. We ought to understand that that's what has happened, but the media aren't helping.