Apr 18th, 2008, 11:42 PM
Not ALL of you are on my myspace friends list, I guess
...But a lot of conservatives are, so I posted this as a bulletin.
---
I have no idea if this will be an issue or not, but if it is, I will save this post to brag about having told you so. Ideally, the earthquake will have no effect whatsoever, since it shouldn’t. But…
Okay. Last time I took a historical event in the present and extrapolated predictions based not on a rational flow of events, but a likely flow of events that stems from America’s pathological lack of historical perspective, I ended up being spot-on. Since there was no MySpace and most of the people with whom I shared my thoughts already knew it anyways, the country is now in a recession spurred from deficit spending to fund a war that only happened because Americans didn’t understand the people who hate us. If you don’t believe me, I can provide names of people whom I told in in 2001 that we’d be fighting wars against countries not involved in the attacks, and people whom I told in 2003 that the war in Iraq would last at least half a decade longer than told us by the administration and cost hundreds of billions of dollars more than we wanted to actually spend.
Anyways.
There was an earthquake last night. I woke up wondering why my desk was making more noise than usual, so within half an hour I checked one of the websites that I have to work with for my job in the Geology Department and sure enough there was a huge red square on a world map over the American Midwest.
When I went into work at the geology department, I fielded phone calls asking for one of my supervisors (the most relevant person on Earth for this event, most likely), asked if I needed to do any lackey jobs, then started formatting databases so that the seismological stations could be accessed more efficiently. I started joking with the secretaries and a grad student about how it’d be a matter of time before we started seeing websites talking about how this earthquake was a sign that a repeat of the 1812 New Madrid Fault quake was about to happen and, of course, the world would end.
One of the grad students responded, “Well, we ARE due for it.” All of a sudden, it became far less of a joke. Not because he was right or because he was wrong, but because people are going to hear that somewhere or read it somewhere else, and they won’t have any idea what that actually means. The American Midwest has been “due” for a huge earthquake for quite some time, and I’ve told people that since high school when I had to research it for Academic Super Bowl. What people don’t understand though is that with stochastic probability for things like earthquakes and hurricanes and winning the lottery, is that being “due” for something will NOT make it happen any time sooner, nor increase the likelihood of it happening all of a sudden. For example: the Yellowstone Supervolcano is right this very moment statistically “due” for an explosion that would destroy America as we know it and possibly cause the worst human catastrophe in history. I can say that because I know my history very well, and for reference, World War II was not the worst human catastrophe in history.
Here’s the catch: the Yellowstone Supervolcano has been “due” to erupt for several tens of thousands of years. Worrying about it all of the sudden because you know about it all of the sudden doesn’t make you informed, it makes you stupid. The exact same thing goes with the New Madrid Fault.
So, if you really want to know, yes. At any second there could be an earthquake sprung from Missouri that could potentially collapse buildings in virtually every city from Kansas to Indianapolis or even Columbus, especially Chicago. Tens of thousands of people might die, the economy would collapse, mass hysteria, dogs and cats living together, blah blah blah. But I’m not worried about it, and if you would rather have something better to worry about, then here’s a list of suggestions:
-Tens of thousands of people die daily from hunger and easily-prevented disease because of complete apathy towards global market disparity. Since we know that paramilitary groups spend a ton of money in black market arms in the region, it would come to very little surprise if they decided to kill us instead of each other. If they wanted to do this, it would be pocket change to them to buy Soviet-era nuclear weapons and destroy every major city in the entire industrial world.
-Whether you believe humans are causing it or not, global warming is happening. If we want to reduce carbon emissions significantly, the only people it would affect would probably be our grandchildren or great-grandchildren, since the carbon cycle is horrifically slow. To totally overlook rising sea levels as an issue, the arable land in the world is going to be entirely reinvented such that crops that evolved or were hybridized to grow in certain climates now have to be allocated to areas where the soil can’t accommodate them as well. When the Levant can’t grow anything but coconuts and Scandinavians start complaining that corn requires too much nitrogen, wars are going to start based on the food market. Alliances will be formed with blatant disregard for politics and based on economic interests even more than usual. Lots of people dead, economic collapse, blah blah blah.
-Since I studied Islamic culture in middle school as a medieval geek, I could tell you then that there are still Arabs who are upset that their ancestors died in the Battle of Tours because of Charlemagne’s grandfather. From there Muslim/Christian relations went downhill in 1096 with Urban II’s “Deus Vult” speech, they slid further in 1492 because of the Reconquista, Britain et alia’s colonial involvement through World War I certainly didn’t slow down the hillside tumble, and then in 1946 the whole issue took a blind nosedive off a cliff when America formally endorsed the Israeli state because it matched the American Fundamentalist image of The Rapture. When a culture has a history book that starts long before the year 1776, they don’t appreciate it when wars are fought against them by politicians who didn’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’ite until Wikipedia was created. Don’t expect things to get better anytime soon.
-Asteroids, comets, quasars, &c.
Please note that I did not include the possibility of CERN creating a black hole that would destroy Earth. I’ve known that they were setting up this experiment back in 2002 when I read The Elegant Universe, and since then I’ve taken enough classes delving into quantum mechanics that I can give you a number of good reasons why black hole paranoia should not register on the list of legitimate worries facing the 21st century Zeitgeist.
Sleep well, kiddos.
Appendix: Pre-emptive predictions about what people will say.
“The earthquake happened on the anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco quake, which means that this is a warning that we’ll get a bigger earthquake like that one if we don’t put an end to people being gay like they are in San Francisco. The quake happened in Illinois, the senatorial base of Barack Obama, a Muslim who wants to sell us to the UN in exchange for more children he plans to eat. Thus, it is a sign that we should abolish the government. Speaking of the UN, that’s where the pope was on the day of the quake, in order to solidify the dark alliance of the Vatican and the New World Order. Obviously, another sign. Notice that he is Benedict XVI. In Roman numerals, 666 ends with XVI (DCLXVI), so this should come as no surprise, although it would be easier if it worked out in Greek numerals since that’s how the New Testament was written, but I don’t know how to read Greek.”
|
Linear Mode
