The effect of the Japan disaster
This AP article just may be the stupidest article on the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that I’ve read so far.
Anyone who never realized that industrialized, organized, complex nations are most vulnerable of all to such threats simply does not think. Every science fiction writer knows better.
Anyone who equates the nuclear part of this disaster with the other two parts simply does not think, or is pushing an anti-nuclear power agenda (sometimes it’s hard to know where the first leaves off and the second begins). But suffice to say that no disaster has happened in the nuclear sense (except an economic one), and it is highly unlikely that one will happen except in the eyes of the press and its readership.
It is especially ironic that AP author Joji Sakurai cites the Lisbon earthquake as a predecessor to the Japan earthquake in changing hearts and minds. I’ve written about the Lisbon earthquake before, here. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 struck the city on a Sunday morning (All Saints Day) when many believers were in church at worship, and its particular horror was that a great many of the dead were among those people. The Lisbon earthquake acted as a death knell to the Age of Faith–how could a benevolent deity have allowed this to happen?–and ushered in a trend towards skepticism, science, and the Enlightenment. The irony is that, if the Japan earthquake does as Joji Sakurai suggests and ends nuclear power (“Is even minimal risk, as with nuclear power, too much risk?”), it will represent a return to an age of faith and the decline of science—in this case, not faith in organized religion, but faith in what Carl Sagan called “the demon-haunted world.”
[NOTE: If you look at the comments section at the AP article (there are over a thousand) and scan the ones that are not just expressions of support for the Japanese people, you’ll find a great deal of evidence that people haven’t a clue what’s going on and are scared out of their wits about the power plant and are demanding the closure of other nuclear power plants. The coverage has had the desired effect. (Although this Fox News poll is a bit reassuring. Older people, men, and Republicans seem to get it.)]
Well, I’m an old, male, Republican voter who even thought about becoming a nuclear engineer when I was in college…so I guess I do get it.
Another contender for stupidest article, in the same disjunct, free-associative, hyperemotional style:
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/13/the-scariest-earthquake-is-yet-to-come.html
Simon Winchester is best known for writing two pleasant but second-rate books about the early history of the OED. This gibberish is much, much worse.
Call it Panic Porn.
I’m old enough to remember that Three Mile Island was supposed to be the end, then Chernobyl (20 years ago!), now it’s Fukushima. The resurgence in Nuclear power was all outside of the US anyway. The few projects in the US were all stalled by a bad economy.
New Nuclear power will be developed by people with less attention to overall quality, with a less honest (better to say shame based) culture. But in the US and Europe, the response may depend on the degree of suspicion of the media hype. An overwrought media killed the global warming plot (it is dead not just pining for the fjords.) and I think it will be the same for nuclear.
neo, you used ‘AP’ and ‘stupidest’ in the same sentence. You’re repeating yourself.
Any article that includes a sentence like “If a technological power like Japan can be so vulnerable, who’s safe?” is written by a child. ‘Safe’ in this sense always seems to imply the existence of an absolute state, a state where on is safe and no danger exists. As in the bosom of your mother.
No one is safe–ever. If they come to realize this as adults these children may mature to the point where they get on with living a life. My fear is that they will fall for the precautionary principle and add to the burden of every mature individual.
I was also reminded of a teacher I once had. He was a city boy who must have lived in very sheltered and unquestioning circumstances. He told us he didn’t discover where milk came from until he was 10 or 12. I couldn’t remember ever not knowing. The point is that he, like many others who write for the AP, have their story committed to memory and completely lack the curiosity needed to learn about the world.
Too bad for them.
Sorry, ‘where ONE is safe’
Probably a good thing Thomas Edison didn’t get accidentally electrocuted or it’d be a long shot for us to even have electricity right now.
“” in this case, not faith in organized religion, but faith in what Carl Sagan called “the demon-haunted world.”””
Neo
Yea lefties thought you needed faith in a transcended God without evidence to be an obnoxious fundamentalist. Turns out all you need is cocksuredness of even earthly political ideas without evidence.
“Probably a good thing Thomas Edison didn’t get accidentally electrocuted or it’d be a long shot for us to even have electricity right now”….Edison used extremely sleazy tactics to try to get his DC system adopted universally in preference to the Westinghouse/Tesla AC system: he attempted to instigate hysteria about high-voltage AC electricity, even going so far as to promote the AC electric chair for executions, buying the equipment on the black market (George Westinghouse refused to sell for this purpose) and helpfully suggesting that the execution process should be called “Westinghousing.”
If the present-day culture of fear had existed back then, he probably would have gotten away with it.
“The Lisbon earthquake acted as a death knell to the Age of Faith—how could a benevolent deity have allowed this to happen?—and ushered in a trend towards skepticism, science, and the Enlightenment.”
Actually, Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod in 1749, and people soon noticed that a church without a lightning rod
was quite likely to burn to the ground, while a neighboring bordello with a lightning rod was completely safe in an electrical storm. This was a new theological insight.
If yelling “FIRE” in a crowded theatre is a punishable offense why is the MSM never legally slapped down for their ever continuing attempts to spread panic?
Time and again they are shown to use bad science, false assertions or outright lies to damage all sorts of businesses, communities or individuals; yet I can’t recall a single time that those blatantly targeted by the MSM have taken any legal action.
No-one seems to even try to hit back. Its as though they themselves completely fall for the MSM’s make believe.
For reasons opaque to me, failure now causes retreat instead of inspiration to build it better and stronger, despite Americans buying better computers and phones and larger homes than ever before.
Retardo:
Re your Newsweek link, I thought they were going to mention the Cascadia fault off the coast of Washington and Oregon. I think that’s likely to go off sooner than the San Andreas. It also has a history of magnitude 8-9 quakes along with tsunamis.
Your “Panic Porn” comment was perfect. I heard that the ratings for the cable news channels were through the roof over the past week, so it certainly works for them.
“Anyone who never realized that industrialized, organized, complex nations are most vulnerable of all to such threats simply does not think.”
Neo, did you see this post by Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club? What Could Go Wrong? It speaks directly to the issue of the fragility of complexity. It seems you’re both on the same path.
As far as Yahoo News goes, I only go there to see what the liberals are thinking.
“Call it Panic Porn.”
Good one!
“For reasons opaque to me, failure now causes retreat instead of inspiration to build it better and stronger.. ”
There is a strong desire on the part of many on the left side to go back to their imagined pre-industrial utopia. The irony is that few if any of them would survive for a month if they had to produce food to put on the table or protect themselves or their families. (That’s a part of why they despise Palin. She’s too self-sufficient.)
I’m listening to Mark Levin, and he just came up with a great line. He said the anti-nuclear people always ask, “Do you want a nuclear power plant in your backyard?” He said, “No, and I don’t want a 7-11 in my backyard either. I don’t want a parking lot in my backyard. There’s a lot of crap I don’t want in my backyard. Those are zoning issues.”
Earlier today I saw an article on the NPR website (it was linked at Ace’s) about the ill-fated flight of the Soyuz 1 spacecraft in 1967:
Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth ‘Crying In Rage’
(The basic outline of the story is correct: the first flight of a badly flawed spacecraft started going wrong almost immediately, and the cosmonaut was killed when the parachutes failed at the end of the flight. But most of the lurid details aren’t true, and if you read the article be sure to read the comments by James Oberg, Asif Siddiqi, and Kristen Bachelor. All are serious, published space historians, and are extremely critical of the article.)
The reason I bring it up is that I saw several comments along the lines of “Spaceflight is so dangerous. Why are we doing this?”
One comment in particular stood out:
What can you say to that?
“I would rather have a wood stove instead of my furnace”….in the Green paradise, wood stoves and fireplaces will be banned. In any event, you’ll be expected to live in an energy-efficient hi-rise.
There was a 60s hippie slogan: “split wood, not atoms.” Their successors today don’t want you to do either.
The word’s first commercial jetliner, the de Havilland Comet, first flew in 1949. Unfortunately, the model encountered a series of disastrous mid-air failures which proved difficult to diagnose. The problem was finally traced (to stress concentration around the windows, oddly enough) and fixed, and the Comet was returned to service.
Meanwhile, the American Boeing 707 was being developed, and it was certificated by the FAA in 1958.
Had the current social climate about technological matters existed in those days, jetliners probably would have been banned for another 20=3- years, and passengers would still have been flying in reciprocating-engine airliners.
It seems that many people today think that the ideal is a perfectly safe, risk-free world.
But when has that ever been the case?
If the FAA, EPA, and OSHA had existed in 1927, would they have prevented Lindbergh from making his historic trans-Atlantic flight?
Good one, David. I wrote my last comment before I saw yours.
Yeah, jets are dangerous. Better stick with propeller planes which don’t disintegrate in mid-air.
“To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law – a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security”
–Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/03/28/110328ta_talk_surowiecki
Well, I’ve seen that a lot more women seem to get it, too. But then, I don’t hang much with Lidiots, either.
A high rise cave, maybe. And ‘energy-efficient’ because there won’t be any electricity. All electricity will be in the shared commune area, where Good Apparatchiks will be bicycling away to generate the all the power Everyone Really Needs.
Get a clue: Post-Modern Green-Liberalism is a completely suicidal misanthropic and anthropophobic meme.
It aims for nothing less than the destruction of all civilization.
To that I say, “F*** YOU!”.
Who are you to tell people they CANNOT risk their lives exploring places no one has ever been, and, as RAH put it, “finding new and more horrible ways to die”?
It’s none of your business! If *YOU* don’t want to do it, and want to stay at home in your apparently safe little nest, then that is YOUR choice.
Me? I’d go out there if you told me my life expectancy would be shortened by 20 years.
“” It seems that many people today think that the ideal is a perfectly safe, risk-free world.””
rickl
Just think of America playing Blackjack with the world in 20 year increments. The last two games we can thank expanding liberalism and feminism for making us stick at about 14. A bigger in reality.
That’s “a bigger risk in reality”
Is that a nice way of saying People who aren’t Democrats?
RickL (9:04 above) quotes
“I wish Earth was pristine and clean again.”
AH! The liberal utopian mind! Someone should explain to him/her that the world was NEVER pristine and clean. Take the ocean, for example. Let this liberal know that s/he’s swimming in fish poop, whale sperm and the particulate matter of decaying carcasses. Pristine, indeed! That ought to keep the enviro-weenies away from the beach this summer.
Igotbupkis (10:46 above) writes:
“Who are you to tell people they CANNOT risk their lives exploring places no one has ever been . . . .”
Carrying that one step further, Lester Thurow (retired Dean MIT Sloane School of Business) discusses Columbus setting sail. Educated people in the 15th century knew the world was round, so why didn’t they sail earlier? Sea Monsters–afraid they would be eaten.
When Columbus returned, he was just lucky; after multiple trips, people began to think that perhaps there weren’t any sea monsters; after hundreds of trips they knew there weren’t sea monsters. The problem is, the first people who make the trip and take the chance become the colonial governors (or they get eaten), the people who make the trip when it’s safe, become the colonists.
“Nothing we do is worth getting hurt?” Then stay safe and do nothing–where does this person work? A mattress-testing company?
As a Southerner, I hate Sherman’s guts on principle, but I sure do love this quote:
“I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast.”
Plus ca change. . . .
“Panic Porn” is good, too. All they’re doing is ginning up hysteria to attract eyeballs, and they really get wrapped around the axle when there’s any Evil Demon-spawn Nukular stuff involved.
Yes, it’s interesting that I find some people more focused on herbal remedies for radiation than on what is actually happening in Japan. The interesting thing is that the focus is so wrong. This disaster shows the fragility of high density urban cities. As always, folks in the rural areas find it easier to survive disaster. Why is it that the same folks panicking about the nukes aren’t equally panicked about high rises?
Sherman–one half of one of the finest military partnerships in history. I will always wonder who would have won a Lee-Jackson v. Grant-Sherman tag-match.
Beverly says, “As a Southerner, I hate Sherman’s guts on principle..”
I understand your gut feeling, but Sherman was given a task and he did end the war of northern aggression swiftly through his scorched earth policy. In the long run that probably saved lives on both sides.
“Virgil Caine is my name and I served on the Danville train. ‘Til Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again. In the winter of ’65, we were hungry, just barely alive, by May the tenth, Richmond had fell. It’s a time I remember, oh so well.
The night they drove old Dixie down and the bells were ringing, the night they drove old Dixie down and the people were singing they went, La, la, la.
Back with my wife in Tennessee, when one day she called to me Virgil, quick, come see, there goes Robert E.Lee. Now I don’t mind choppin’ wood, and I don’t care if the money’s no good, you take what you need and you leave the rest. But they should never have taken the very best.”
Parker Says:
March 22nd, 2011 at 6:38 pm
Exactly so, and Sherman himself knew it very well:
I’m a lifelong Northerner who is rather sympathetic to the cause of Southern independence. But, nevertheless, I regard Sherman as a model for how war should be conducted. If you’re going to war, go all in, and fight to win and destroy the enemy. None of this “limited rules of engagement” or “negotiated settlement” crap. All that does is prolong it and cause resentments to simmer and flare up again at a future date.
We need more Shermans, Pattons, and LeMays today fighting the threat from Islam. Sooner or later, one way or another, we will get them.
rickly,
We are definitely on the same page….
“I regard Sherman as a model for how war should be conducted. If you’re going to war, go all in, and fight to win and destroy the enemy. None of this “limited rules of engagement” or “negotiated settlement” crap. All that does is prolong it and cause resentments to simmer and flare up again at a future date.”
Look how well Japan turned out. 😉
Kill however many it takes, destroy everything necessary, and then once they raise the white flag tell them exactly what they must do to continue breathing and blinking. Anything less is not victory and nothing trumps victory.