Partial meltdown, full meltdown, core meltdown: The operative word for the malfunctioning media is “meltdown.” Nuclear meltdown. There is no grand conspiracy, as suggested by Glenn Beck, in mainstream media’s coverage of the earthquake in Japan, only unadorned stupidity. Most media members have not been schooled in the craft of old-fashioned journalism, but in activism. To them, every news story becomes, reflexively, a cause; a reason to promote “awareness,” rather than tell the whole story without zeroing-in on appealing aspects of it. That so many of these outlets settled on the identical front-page lede is indicative of the unanimity in their thinking, of group-think. But, if you suggested to CNN’s Alpha Female Anderson Cooper that an exclusive focus on an angle in a story is itself evidence of bias, you’d just confuse this saccharine simpleton.

To be fair to the next newspapers, they show more fidelity to the truth by referring to “blasts” and “explosions,” rather than end-of-days scenarios:

USAToday: “Explosion rocks Japan nuclear plant”
BBC: “New blast at Japan nuclear plant”
The Washington Times: “Radiation leaks are feared following third a third explosion rocked one of Japan’s three crippled nuclear reactors.”

The following, however, is standard fare:

PBS: “Post-Quake Japan Faces Nuclear Threat”
NYT: “Japan Faces Potential Nuclear Disaster as Radiation Levels Rise”
Spiegel Online: “Fukushima Marks the End of the Nuclear Era”

Buried inside one NYT report was a less overheated tidbit: “To date, even during the four-day crisis in Japan that amounts to the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, workers had managed to avoid a breach of a containment vessel and had limited releases of radioactive steam to relatively low levels.”

As a consequence, we have not seen nearly enough footage of how impressively the Japanese people are coping; how stoical and courageous they appear in interviews. When CNN’s international correspondent alluded to “scenes of hardship,” the camera cut to a shelter. The images were heartbreaking, to be sure. But, unlike those taken during Katrina, they gave hope. One saw rows of neatly laid-out mats. The elderly were lying down and were snugly tucked in clean blankets. Kids, faces covered with masks, were sweeping the floors industriously.

In other footage, rows of people snaked around the neighborhood as they waited to purchase food and water. No looting and no stealing had been reported. Interviewed, the queuing individuals were grief-struck, but they held it together. To me, this is remarkable. Nobody was screaming for government aid, either.

I’d like to know more about how well the Japanese rescuers are doing. Or how supplies are holding up. But, I guess we are, to an extent, at the mercies of the one-track minded media collective.

Oh yes, I’ve seen quite a few interviews with American experts on the ground … in the USA. “It’s way past Three Mile Island already,’ said physicist Frank von Hippel. ‘The biggest risk now is that the core really melts down and you have a steam explosion.'”

Where exactly was Professor von Hippel situated? At Princeton, New Jersey.

Far fewer have been the interviews with Japanese men and women at ground zero.

UPDATE I (March 15): Some sanity (via Steve Horwitz on Facebook).

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UPDATE II (March 16): “Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl.” Apparently “the sales of Geiger counters and potassium iodide supplements that can block some radiation have surged nationwide since Friday, fueled by concerns among some Americans that radiation released from Japanese nuclear plants could spread to the United States.” (Seattle Time)

I’m speechless. Doesn’t happen often. I consider myself on the ball when it comes to health hazards. Come six months, and the dentist and I have our perennial quibble. He wants to X-ray me, I say, “Unless you find something untoward during the exam, your full, refundable, set of X-rays is an event that comes around only every five years.

I wash fruit and veg, down to the berry and the grape, with soapy water; have done so for decades, in order to reduce the ingestion of pesticides. I’m the Howard Hughes of hygiene; I don’t go anywhere without my wet ones. But what I hear from the media and the masses about radiation wafting over from Japan is pure insanity. I don’t heed a word. It’s a shame that America’s journalists get to award themselves for heroism and journalism. These people are stupid sickos. I read at Larry Auster’s that liberals are crazy because they are slaves to tolerance. No; their state of apoplexy comes from their irrationality.

UPDATE III (March 16): Ann Coulter issues a “glowing report on radiation”: “Although it is hardly a settled scientific fact that excess radiation is a health benefit, there’s certainly evidence that it decreases the risk of some cancers – and there are plenty of scientists willing to say so. But Jenny McCarthy’s vaccine theories get more press than Harvard physics professors’ studies on the potential benefits of radiation. (And they say conservatives are anti-science!)”

The following is an excerpt from “Charlie Sheen’s Out of the AA ‘Troll Hole,'” this week’s WND.COM column:

“I liked Charlie Sheen’s ‘Platoon,’ but not his comedic ‘work’ (that’s a pretentious word used by America’s self-aggrandizing entertainers and jesters to describe their occupation). Sheen does, however, get high marks for bucking the drug-addiction industry, which bullies drug users into treatment, and has fabricated a science in support of the disease theory of addiction. …

… Unlike the automatons of the entertainment industry — and the population at large — the intemperate Mr. Sheen refuses to accept as holy writ the teachings of a therapeutic cult that coerces its adherents into conformity. …

… Naturally, the Shamans, Left and Right, are furious with Sheen. … In thinking about addiction, opinions have converged. So-called social progressives and conservatives alike share the same ideological hangover from the Prohibition era (with a touch of AA sadism). Dr. Keith Ablo, like Drew Pinsky, is thus every bit as religious about roping the actor into abstinence and AA.”

The complete column is “Charlie Sheen’s Out of the AA ‘Troll Hole,'” now on WND.COM.

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UPDATE I: Heidi H. wrote on Facebook: “I’m baffled by your fascination and admiration for Charlie Sheen. He’s a pig. His excuse is fame and crack. What do you find so endearing about him?”

Me: “Heidi: where do you get fascinated? The war on drugs is a crucial issue to those who care about liberty. The addiction industry factors into that equation. Perhaps this will better explain:
http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article…_list_view.php?editid1=198

UPDATE II: If they could, they would chemically lobotomize me too. The reader below has diagnosed me with “Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” and bemoans the fact that I have not been duly medicated. I’m proud to be in opposition to tyranny, dependency and the decimation of free will by the therapeutic authorities (who often work hand-in-hand with the state).

Distaff America’s claims of disadvantage can be easily dispelled: “If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market. The fact that the wily entrepreneur doesn’t ditch men in favor of women suggests that different abilities and experience are at work, rather than a conspiracy to suppress women.” [“Barack Against The Boys“] Yet the White House has preferred to perpetrate the myth, starting with a pay equity act the president signed at the beginning of his interminable term, and now with a new report affirming that “the earnings gap between men and women” is a result of all sorts of discrimination. HERE.

Scholarly reams have been written disputing this phony calculus, as it omits vital variables: How long the woman has been in the work force, her age, experience and education; or whether her career has been put on hold to marry and mother. Just as women are more likely than men to have had an interrupted career trajectory, so too are they more inclined to enter lower-paying professions: education instead of engineering, for example.

UPDATE: BEWARE THE WASPS. It was interesting to observe the neoconservative programmed response to the news about a “Texas college scholarship that targets only white male students.” I am referring to the obligatory PC huffing and puffing of Greg Gutfeld and his crew, last night, as to the “low-life racists” who would dare dream-up such a scheme.

Tucker Carlson, a kind of paleoconservative, chimed in with a full-throated denunciation, but, at least, pointed out the obvious: how is this scholarship different to the affirmative action programs that have infested every nook and cranny of the American labor force, public and private, for decades?

The thing that makes these gilded, neocon elites mere retread left-liberals is the fact that they mock the brute fact that poor white men are extremely marginalized in the workforce. The data abound. They ignore the Frank Riccis of the country. In my forthcoming book, I cite, among other sources, sociologist Frederick R. Lynch’s “Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action”(1991).

But in case you need a reminder of the jeering contempt the neoconservative faction of the left-liberal establishment has for the plight of white (poor) males in American society, watch last night’s “Red Eye” segment (it’s generally very amusing, by the way).

Naturally, this element of the establishment has never bothered to expose Saint Bill Gates’ “No-WASP Scholarship” fund.

During an hour-long interview with CNN”s Piers Morgan, Charlie Sheen had some choice words for the addiction industry (Sheen’s clearly an enemy of the Industry.) I loved every minute of it.

SHEEN: “I’ve been around them for 22 years. And they’ve been lying to me for two decades. … I’m a winner and their lives look like they’re — you know, ruled by losers. Just to put it in black and white terms. I don’t want their lives, and they want mine, but they want to criticize the hell out of it. … I don’t believe myself to be an addict. I really don’t. I think that I just ignore or smash or finally dismiss a model that I think is rooted in vintage balderdash, you know? For lack of a better word.”

Lovely.

And about the busybody public Sheen said this: “I wish people would shift that focus on to themselves and their own family and their own friends and just maybe spend a little more time on their home front.” [Transcripts.]

Watch out: The Shamans will be furious. Haven’t the likes of Drs. Keith Ablo and Drew Pinsky labored to create lucrative niches for themselves in the media by medicalizing all manner of misbehavior?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders started out with some 60 categories of disorders (not diseases). It now sports hundreds for which a biological origin is asserted (with little scientific backing). Good for Sheen for copping only to being a bad boy, not a sick boy in need of the ministrations of prissy prohibitionists.

From “Mel’s Malady, Foxman’s Fetish”:

The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency (the “experts”) have slapped all manner of misconduct with diagnostic labels. At the root of this diseasing of behavior is the eradication of good and bad. Placing bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, moreover, makes it amenable to external, “therapeutic” or state interventions.
Liberals first, and conservatives in short succession, have taken to the idiom of disease like ducks to water. Left and right now insist, based on wispy pseudoscience, that just about every human excess is an illness as organic as cancer or diabetes.
A teacher who seduces her underage pupil has to be “sick,” or else she’d not have indulged her fantasies. The same post hoc illogic is applied to the morbidly obese: if you overeat, you’re diseased!
Are you a dad who dotes on his kids when they are around, but fails to mail them child support money when they return to mom? There’s a Harvard professor by the name of Dr. John Ratey who’ll cheerily diagnose you with “Environmental Dependency Disorder”: you remember your kids only when they are present.
And so it goes: the arsonist has “pyromania,” the thief is inflicted with “kleptomania,” and Bill Clinton is not promiscuous, but a “sex-addict.”

From “Addictions Are About Behavior, Not Disease”:

“When it comes to thinking about addiction, opinions converge. Having bought into the addiction industry’s mantra, so-called social progressives and conservatives alike share the same ideological hangover from the Prohibition era, with a twist of AA sadism: all are religious about abstinence, and all accept as bible from Sinai the wisdom of coercing addicts into treatment regimens. But perhaps the greatest error made in the attempt at humane formulations about addiction is to cast as a disease what is essentially a problem of behavior. …

“The rationale for using the disease model to describe addiction even though it is intellectually dishonest is that medical treatment is effective. Yet another deception. An overview of controlled studies indicates that ‘treated patients do not fare better than untreated people with the same problems.’ Of note is a 4500-subject-strong 1996 US epidemiological study conducted by the National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiological Survey. Treated alcoholics, it was found, were more heavily alcohol dependent on average than untreated alcoholics. Clearly a behavioral problem cannot be remedied by medical intervention. Addicts are cured when they decide to give up the habit.”

I don’t watch Sheen’s television. But as far as bucking a treatment industry that relies, for the most, on coercing addicts into rehabilitation—I say, Shine on Sheen, You Crazy Diamond.

UPDATE: Contemplationist: Dr. Thomas Szasz is a friend who is featured on these (BAB’s) pixelated pages. Do search for his articles under “BAB’s A List.” Tom has provided praise for my new book, to be released on May 10, 2011. Sign-up for my newsletter, befriend me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter for updates.