Sleepy Sunday Open Trackback

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The True Chernobyl Disaster

[from Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century, a speech by Michael Crichton at Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy, Washington DC,
November 6, 2005]

(...) Some of you know I have written a book that many people find controversial. It is called State of Fear, and I want to tell you how I came to write it. Because up until five years ago, I had very conventional ideas about the environment and the success of the environmental movement.

The book really began in 1998, when I set out to write a novel about a global disaster. In the course of my preparation, I rather casually reviewed what had happened in Chernobyl, since that was the worst manmade disaster in recent times that I knew about.

What I discovered stunned me. Chernobyl was a tragic event, but nothing remotely close to the global catastrophe I imagined. About 50 people had died in Chernobyl, roughly the number of Americans that die every day in traffic accidents. I don’t mean to be gruesome, but it was a setback for me. You can’t write a novel about a global disaster in which only 50 people die.

Undaunted, I began to research other kinds of disasters that might fulfill my novelistic requirements. That’s when I began to realize how big our planet really is, and how resilient its systems seem to be. Even though I wanted to create a fictional catastrophe of global proportions, I found it hard to come up with a credible example. In the end, I set the book aside, and wrote Prey instead.

But the shock that I had experienced reverberated within me for a while. Because what I had been led to believe about Chernobyl was not merely wrong—it was astonishingly wrong. Let’s review the data.

The initial reports in 1986 claimed 2,000 dead, and an unknown number of future deaths and deformities occurring in a wide swath extending from Sweden to the Black Sea. As the years passed, the size of the disaster increased; by 2000, the BBC and New York Times estimated 15,000-30,000 dead, and so on…

Now, to report that 15,000-30,000 people have died, when the actual number is 56, represents a big error. Let’s try to get some idea of how big. Suppose we line up all the victims in a row. If 56 people are each represented by one foot of space, then 56 feet is roughly the distance from me to the fourth row of the auditorium. Fifteen thousand people is three miles away. It seems difficult to make a mistake of that scale.

But, of course, you think, we’re talking about radiation: what about long-term consequences? Unfortunately here the media reports are even less accurate.

The chart shows estimates as high as 3.5 million, or 500,000 deaths, when the actual number of delayed deaths is less than 4,000. That’s the number of Americans who die of adverse drug reactions every six weeks. Again, a huge error.

But most troubling of all, according to the UN report in 2005, is that "the largest public health problem created by the accident" is the "damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of accurate information…[manifesting] as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state."

In other words, the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information.

[by Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century, © 2005 Constant c Productions, Inc. All rights reserved]

A Scream for Freedom

A Chinese woman disrupted president Hu's speech on south lawn at White House. "President Bush, stop him from killing - shouted the woman - Stop persecuting the Falun Gong". She was taken away by uniformed secret service officers... right after Bush urged Hu to allow Chinese to "speak freely". You can download the video here (wmv format, 8.4 mb, via Michelle Malkin).

Round-Up: Michelle Malkin, Riehl World View, Hyscience, RConversation, PunditGuy, Drudge Report, Outside The Beltway, NewsBusters.org, Gateway Pundit, Peaktalk, Blogs for Bush, The Corner (NRO).

South Park vs. Cartoon Jihad/3

Michelle Malkin brings the "South Park scandal" on the New York Post, with a harsh op-ed ("Cowardly Central") against the hypocrisy of the Comedy Central network (owned by Viacom, like MTV). Michelle, who belongs to the so-called religious right, attacks the double standard which censored an image of Muhammad but didn't use the same amount of political correctness with the symbols of christian religion. "Christians, you see, don't have politically correct protected status - writes Malkin - That privilege is bestowed only on riotous Muslims and celebrity Scientologists (Comedy Central recently pulled a "South Park" episode satirizing the latter). In fact, the day after the Mohammed "South Park" blackout, MTV (owned by Comedy Central's parent company, Viacom) announced plans to air a pope-bashing cartoon in Germany depicting the pontiff as a pogo-stick-riding loon". Another conservative newspaper, the Washington Times, published an op-ed on the same subject, citing Kyle (one of the terrible kids of the show by Parker and Stone) who tells the Fox president: "If you don't show Muhammad, then you've made a distinction between what is OK to make fun of and what isn't. Either it's all OK or none of it is. Do the right thing".

Round-Up (MSM): WorldNetDaily, BBC News, Washington Post, CNN.com, ABC News, Chicago Tribune, Globe and Mail, Monsters and Critics, E! Online, San Jose Mercury News, Deadbolt, GetReligion, Salon.com, The American Daily.

Round-Up (Blogosphere): Michelle Malkin, Patterico's Pontifications, The Volokh Conspiracy, The Jawa Report, Blue Crab Boulevard, PoliPundit.com, Iowa Voice, Cake or Death, Friends of Micronesia, Scott Allan's World, A Tic in the Mind's Eye, David Boyd, Gone Hollywood, The Cranky Insomniac, Blue Star Chronicles, Rhymes with Right, California Conservative, Pajamas Media, Sammenhold, Adam’s Blog, Point Five.

South Park vs. Cartoon Jihad/2

After being censored in the second part of the South Park episode about Cartoon Wars, Trey Parker and Matt Stone skewered Comedy Central for hypocrisy (at Michelle Malkin, some proposals for a new logo). Comedy Central decided not to run the image of Muhammad (but had no problems at all in featuring "an image of Jesus Christ defecating on President Bush and the American flag"). Often criticized by religious right, but literally adored by libertarian-conservatives, Parker and Stone are now in the middle of a huge controversy, but finally the American Right is fighting this battle on the same side of the field. UPDATE. You can watch the episode online (divided in three segments) here, here and here.

Round-Up: Michelle Malkin, The Anchoress, Power Line, The Irish Trojan's Blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, Captain's Quarters, Hugh Hewitt, Carol Platt Liebau, Flopping Aces, Media Blog (NRO), Outside The Beltway, Instapundit, CNSNews, Betsy's Page, Sister Toldjah, Outside The Beltway, Wizbang, The Irish Trojan's Blog, TV Squad, Iowa Voice, PoliBlog, Cam Edwards, Right Wing News, OPFOR, Althouse, New England Republican, The Claremont Institute, Don Surber, NewsBusters.org, The Coalition of the Swilling, PoliPundit.com, Dartblog.com, Damnum absque injuria, The Malcontent.

South Park vs. Cartoon Jihad

Comedy Central broadcasted an episode of South Park which is going to generate a lot of buzz. This episode (first of two parts) of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's tv-show is centered around the Mohammed cartoon controversy. All the details at The Officer's Club, Newsbusters.org, Michelle Malkin and USS Neverdock. If you can't wait to watch it on television, you can watch it online (divided in three segments) here, here and here. Enjoy, you bastards!

UPDATE. The Right Side of American blogosphere (what do you say, there's also a rive gauche? sorry, doesn't ring a bell...) really appreciated last South Park episode. A quick round-up of the blogstorming: Captain's Quarters, Dhimmi Watch, GOP Vixen, The Anchoress, Betsy's Page, The Political Pit Bull, Brendan Loy, The Irish Trojan's Blog, Vie de Malchance, The Byzantine Spy's Journal, Vicki Fox, Lag in Iraq, Are We Lumberjacks?, Black Five, Southern California View from the Right, Belch Speak, Foehammer, Rocketman's Revenge, The Freedom Fighters Journal, The Valium Sofa, KC Writer, Ed Driscoll, Blacke Knights Hideout, Seattle Scribe, The Pure Investor Blog, Prairie Pundit, The Thunder Run, Super Fun Power Hour, Sammenhold.

UPDATE (2). A South Park citizen tries to convince a dhimmi crowd: "Freedom of speech is at stake here, don't you all see? If anything, we should all make cartoons of Mohammed and show the terrorists and the extremists that we are all united in the belief that every person has a right to say what they want. Look people, it's been really easy for us to stand up for free speech lately. For the past few decades, we haven't had to risk anything to defend it. One of those times is right now. And if we aren't willing to risk what we have now, then we just believe in free speech, but won't defend it".