UPDATED: Stoic, Heroic Japan Vs. Neurotic Nation USA

Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Human Accomplishment, Journalism, Media, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Technology

The following is from “Stoic, Heroic Japan Vs. Neurotic Nation USA,” my new, WND.COM column:

” … Our country’s edgy experts have ordered the evacuation of Americans in Japan within a 50-mile radius of the damaged reactors at Fukushima. Japan is being harangued to ape America. The Japanese have, so far, moved people from within a 20-kilometer radius of the power plant. Funny that. The Neurotic Nation, whose military personnel in Japan are popping iodine pills if they’ve so much as flown over, or visited, the vicinity, expects the country that is fielding “The Fukushima 50″ to do the same. …

… Judging by their bombast, you’d think that our experts have been to the site at Fukushima. Indeed, Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, asserted that the water meant to cover and cool the spent fuel pool at the No. 4 reactor had evaporated, leaving the rods dangerously exposed. They were overheating, he declared from ground zero … at the House Energy and Commerce Committee panel in Washington. …

Are the nuclear plants in Japan working the way ours do in America? MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked one of the many American specialists to shamelessly share his findings from afar.

Hardball’s blowhard has a point. The USA’s stellar safety record—the best in the world, perhaps—is helped by the fact that we don’t have much of a nuclear power industry. Following the recommendations set out in ‘The China Syndrome,’ a Hollywood dramatization of the incident at Three Mile Island, the construction of new reactors in the USA was practically halted. Nobody died in that 1979 accident in Pennsylvania. Nobody but the nuclear-power industry. …

… The chauvinism with which our ego-bound elites are treating The Japanese Other continued apace. After all, this genteel, able people do not qualify as members of an easy-to-patronize, protected group, the kind so valued in the U.S. …”

The complete column is “Stoic, Heroic Japan Vs. Neurotic Nation USA,” now on WND.COM.

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UPDATE (March 20): Newsweak acknowledges Japan’s strengths: “In spite of monumental collapse and ruin, the Japanese politely wait in long lines for hours, without once complaining. Law and order are respected at every step. The Shinto-Buddhist tradition, which stresses social harmony and cohesiveness and looking out for your neighbor, is deeply ingrained in the culture. This stands in sharp contrast to some of the spontaneous reactions that have flared in the West. In the US, for example, a simple blackout back in 1977 unleashed an embarrassing wave of looting and mayhem, with marauding bands of thieves making off with anything they could carry.” …

But then, the reporter tries to blame Japan’s “ethical and social homogeneous” culture for the horrific monetary policies the country’s leaders have pursued, and for the country’s apparent paucity of “new off-beat ideas and technology, where the key is to be nimble and creative.” Any assertions will do when you are trying to redeem the morass and misery of official multiculturalism.

Neocons Banished To The Backseat

Foreign Policy, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, UN, Uncategorized, War

In urging a no-fly zone over Libya (link), the neoconservatives wanted more than anything to see the US take the lead, once again, in democratic, faith-based initiatives around the world.

Neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer (joined by eager pup Steven Hayes of the Weekly Standard) were champing at the bit to take the battle for Libya away from the Libyan people and put it where it belongs: the US military. Today, Obama threw America’s heft (such as it is these days) behind a U.N. Security Council no-fly zone over Libya. What this move lacks in glory, from the neocons’ position, it makes up for in the potential for blood, guts and gore. Except that the US—again, from where the neocons are perched—will take a strategic backseat to the UN:

The resolution passed 10-0 with five abstentions, including Russia and China.
The resolution establishes “a ban on all flights in the airspace of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” while excluding an occupation force. It also calls for freezing the assets of the Libyan National Oil Corp. and the central bank because of links to Gadhafi.

[MSNBC]

Joining in this UN resolution means, in effect, that American funding and firepower will be channeled into one more futile expedition over a Muslim country. Neocons will act disappointed, having been denied leadership position in the expedition. But to all intents and purposes, the US (via our debtholders) will be left to carry the can.

UPDATE III: Media Meltdown (Neurotic Nation)

Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Journalism, Media, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Technology

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!)”

UPDATE II: Japan Won’t Be Needing Sean Penn

Asia, Crime, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Multiculturalism, Technology, Uncategorized

The rude Wolf Blitzer’s interview with Ichiro Fujisaki, the Japanese ambassador to the united states, reminded me of the time the regal (Akio) Toyoda went up against the proverbial Torquemada, his tormentors on the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. (Here) No words of condolence did Blitzer offer to the Japanese gentleman for the calamity his country and people have endured. Instead, Wolf hammered Fujisaki about the possibility of “another Chernobyl,” a meltdown, at one of the Fukushima’s Daiichi nuclear power reactors.

The March 11, magnitude 8.9 earthquake had damaged the Fukushima 1 power station. BBC reports more reliably and with greater detail that a big explosion on Saturday had caused “the cooling system to fail at the No 3 reactor and the fuel rods inside had been exposed.” (HERE) Wolf finally explained that the “tsunami had put that whole power plant basically under water, and killed its coolant capabilities.” (Transcripts) Fujisaki reiterated that, “We do not see evidence of a meltdown at this time,” and that his government had already evacuated the people, First from a three kilometer radius, then 10, and finally 20 kilometers radius. “We are taking as most cautious measures and we’re trying to evacuate people so that accident will not really affect people,” Fujisaki explained.

CNN further reported, via the Kyoto News Agency (the official Japanese news agency), that “9,500 people are unaccounted for. We cannot confirm that they are all deaths but know for a fact that 9,500 are missing.” A far smaller, magnitude 7.0. seismic event in Haiti, which CNN keeps invoking, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and the place is still in ruins, despite the rescue efforts of Hollywood actor Sean Penn. (And it’s not just the building codes, as our media’s analysis would have it.) Blitzer wanted to know if Japan could cope with its reactors without the US! The Chutzpah! How many working reactors does the US have?

Fujisaki assured him with the utmost politeness that “we are now coping with this issue ourselves. But, of course, there could be some consultation with other countries. But for the moment, because it’s just happening now, we are doing — working on ourselves.”

Wolf seemed shocked that a tremor and attendant tsunami that generated 30- to 50 foot tall walls of water that crashed onto Japan’s north-east coast had left some 6 million households without electricity. The ambassador assured Wolf that the number was down to 2.5 million. If that is correct, it is remarkable. Wolf and CNN hardly breathed a word about the biggest windstorm to have hit Washington and Oregon in decades. In 2006, “at least a million residents in the Pacific Northwest were stranded without power for days, in primitive conditions, befitting a Third World country.” Is Wolf unaware that, with Katrina, the US had established the gold standard for government ineptitude in a disaster? We in the Pacific North West are due for what Japan has just endured. We call it “The Big One.” The Japanese have responded calmly. I’d feel far safer in a disaster if at the helm were people who were driven by national and personal pride to put their best foot forward, and to stay stoical and soldier on.

Japan will be okay. It’s a highly civilized, advanced society.

When Wolf repeated, incredulously, “No looting? No looting; are you sure?”, one of CNN’s foreign correspondents, a Japanese woman (you guessed, her story is nowhere to be found on CNN’s website), proudly recounted how crime-free Japan is; how people pull together, yet are propelled forward by individual agency and initiative; how honest the average individual is; how, if you lose your wallet, you’ll likely find it at the nearest police station.

My husband, who traveled there recently, found the Japanese he collaborated with remarkably polite, refined, and respectful of experience and skill (whereas here in the US we idolize the average hubristic Millennial).

Japan is not a very “diverse” society, you know. Actually, it’s a homogeneous country. And as Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam discovered, but tried his best not to divulge, “In diverse communities, people ‘hunker down’: they withdraw, have fewer ‘friends and confidants,’ distrust their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin, expect the worst from local leaders, volunteer and carpool less, give less to charity, and ‘agitate for social reform more,’ with little hope of success. They also huddle in front of the television. Activism alternates with escapism, unhappiness with ennui.” …

UPDATE I: I have just posted this comment on Facebook, where the blog post seems to have struck a chord: “You all seem to have picked up on the incredible chauvinism with which our elites treat The Other—unless this Other is an illegal immigrant criminal, or some knuckles-dragging atavist. Do you think this has to do with the comfort those who have little awareness of their own motivation derive from patronizing lesser individuals? Underachievers make us feel good about ourselves. The latter are easier to ‘help.'”

UPDATE II: With respect to “individual agency” and the attempt to do your best—values Japanese society upholds— Sean related the following: exiting the train station that takes you from Tokyo airport to the down down area, he flagged a taxicab. The driver could not speak a word of English, which makes him not that different from the cabdrivers you hail on American soil. With two exceptions: the first being that the driver was in his own, Japanese-speaking country. The second was the way he proceeded. This gentleman overcame the language barrier thus: Unable to decipher the note my husband had handed him in English as to his destination, Sean’s Japanese cabby existed his vehicle, leaving Sean in it ALONE, and stopped a near by policeman. The latter explained to the cabby where the client (Sean) was headed. A confident cabby got into the cab he had abandoned to look for a cop, and drove my husband to his destination. This kind of experience was repeated throughout his trip: agency, efficiency, occupational pride, politeness.

In a word: a traditional society, the kind this American historian believes thwarts progress.