Karma Titanic

Image: R.M.S. Titanic's bow in 1999. (P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology).

Most of this month, the blog was on semi-hiatus, so I missed the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on 15 April 2012. There are some amazing pictures of the Titanic to commemorate the anniversary at the Boston Globe, here and an interview with one of the last survivors, Eva Hart, here. Hart described the moment when the ship hit the iceberg as a slight bump, like a train pulling into a station. For years, the Titanic has been synonymous with the beauty, power and folly of hubris, especially undue pride in the heights of human technology. The historic lesson of the Titanic, as with Chernobyl or Fukushima, is that the gods punish those who challenge nature without humility. It is all the more strange, then, that Australian billionaire Baby Boomer Clive Palmer is building a modern replica of the Titanic; the announcement was part of the publicity associated with his bid to run for the Australian parliament. Titanic II will make its maiden voyage from England to New York City in 2016. Today on Twitter, one of his followers asked Millennial guru Deepak Chopra, "what is karma?" Chopra answered: "It is an echo of the past."

The bow, broken in half from the shattered stern (see it here). Image: COPYRIGHT© 2012 RMS TITANIC, INC; Produced by AIVL, WHOI.

Sit Out the Apocalypse in Style

Image Source: Phantoms and Monsters.

Earlier this month, Phantoms and Monsters covered an underground luxury condo currently being built for millionnaire Preppers, fashioned out of an old missile silo in Kansas:

The 'Doomsday shelter' being built below Kansas prairie where millionaires will be able to sit out the Apocalypse in style.

When you buy a house, you end up feeling like you will be paying it off until the world ends. Well, how about one of these luxurious condos, which come with all the mod-cons, as well as a pool, a movie theater and a library - oh, and a guarantee that it will survive Doomsday if and when that fateful day comes.

For these luxury flats, deep below the Kansas prairie in the shaft of an abandoned missile silo, are meant to withstand everything from economic collapse and solar flares to terrorist attacks and pandemics.

Naturally, there will be no one around to phone if the guarantee fails - but at that point, the insurance will probably be the least of your worries.

So far, four buyers have thrown down a total of about $7million (£4.4m) for havens to flee to when disaster happens or the end is nigh. And developer Larry Hall has options to retro-fit three more Cold War-era silos when this one fills up.

Hall said: 'They worry about events ranging from solar flares, to economic collapse, to pandemics to terrorism to food shortages.'

These 'doomsday preppers', as they are called, want a safe place and he will be there with them because Hall, 55, bought one of the condos for himself. He says his fear is that sun flares could wipe out the power grid and cause chaos.

See the full original report at the Daily Mail. This home-away-from-home has all the charm of deck chairs on the Titanic. The setting would make a great sci-fi horror actioner about how undergound silo condo life after Armageddon could go horribly, horribly wrong. It could be a Millennial Prepper homage to Buñuel's 1962 Mexican film, The Exterminating Angel (which you can watch online here, here, here - and with English subtitles here). Wiki notes that the film was mentioned in the 2011 movie, "Midnight in Paris [in which] the main character, Gil (Owen Wilson), travels back in time to 1920s Paris and suggests a story to a perplexed young Buñuel (Adrien de Van) about guests who arrive for a dinner party and can’t leave. Buñuel asks, "But why can’t they leave? I don’t understand". After Gil leaves, Buñuel is still muttering to himself, '...what's holding them in the room?...'" What would keep the condo's owners in the silo, if the simple fear of Apocalypse, fed by the Internet, would prompt them to pay for quarters here in the first place?  Fear of the future?  Fear of life? Death? Survival? Fear of descending into savagery, in a closed vault, which would undoubtedly swiftly deliver them to that end?

Interested parties in this project include an "NFL player, a racing car driver, a movie producer and famous politicians." Fortunately for some investors, their down payment cheques are bouncing. One Prepper wants one whole silo all to himself, and as designer Larry Hall puts it, "I won't know [about] that until his check clears the bank." More material! What kind of novel could you write about the one guy who survives the Apocalypse, alone in luxury, trapped underground? Images below of Hall's designs are © L. Hall and from the Daily Mail piece.

A Millennial Sacred Task

Image Source/Text: B.Mad.

Caption for the photo: "This may not be the specific torso he was writing about, but it's the one I think about. Rilke was probably referring to the Apollo torso in the Louvre, since he lived in Paris. However, I am sure that this is the torso that Michelangelo admired so much, and that had great influence on Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque sculpture. This statue was discovered in the Campo de' Fiori, in Rome during the period of Pope Julius II (pope 1503-1513). It was once believed to be a 1st century BC original, but is now believed to be a copy of an older statue, likely dating to the 2nd century BC."

Rapid change from technological innovation eliminates many traditions, values and objects from the past. This may account for Millennial attempts to preserve styles from the past, such as Steampunk, or what I have described on this blog as Retro-futurism (defined here as instances where people take things from the past and revive them now, or project them into the future; retro-futurism is more usually defined as past attempts to imagine the future). Maybe one of the sacred tasks of this period is to select aspects of the past and preserve them before they are lost, or to preserve their meaning before they are reset in Post-Postmodern contexts which make them unintelligible.

But maybe preservation of the past only accelerates change. The still-powerful past determines which things we cannot discard; it reminds us of the things we cannot escape. As a result, it is a catalyst for introspection. And anything we specifically choose to save from the turn of innovation will provoke all the more self-questioning. Ironically, the continued power of the past thereby forces change toward the future. This paradox about the continued life of the past and its transformation into the future reminded me of Rilke's poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo (see a discussion at the Guardian and modern translations here).

Nuclear Leaks 18: Fukushima's Imperial Majesty and Hungry Water Spirits

Image Source: Facebook.

As a nuclear crisis hangs in the balance in Japan, symbolism and mythology surrounding the environmental threat gain significance. The slip into an atmosphere of uncertainty begins with strange gekokujō (下剋上) moments, with challenges to conventional, contemporary officials and moral appeals to traditional authority. An illustration comes from the Emperor of Japan's annual spring garden party in the Akasaka Imperial Garden in Tokyo. At the party, the Emperor politely asked Governor Murai of Miyagi Prefecture what workers were doing, exactly, with radioactive debris.  Were they disposing of it carefully?

Hard to say.  In Minamisōma, Fukushima Prefecture, in February and March 2012, there was talk of mysterious black dust everywhere, which had never before been seen. On 27 April 2012, it was officially confirmed that the dust contained plutonium 238, 239, 240, 241 and strontium 89 and 90. It also has huge levels of radioactive cesium 134 and 137. One concerned city official remarks that all the black dust has "blown away." You can see his video of local dust storms, here, and his blog here.

Then there is this little piece, about Kindergarten children who were engaged to wipe down low level hot spots, namely mailboxes, in Ryozen-machi district of Date City in Fukushima Prefecture, 50 kilometres (31 miles) from the ruined Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant. Radiation rates are about 1 to 3 microsieverts per hour, with higher doses here and there, which occasioned previous recommendations that the city's children stay inside.

For reference, in May 2011, the Japanese legal radiation level under which under-18s were allowed to work outside was 0.6 microsieverts per hour.  You can see a discussion about safe levels of radiation in Japan, including the comments section which has many links, here. On the other hand, a comment from the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons provides an opposing view, and dismisses the dangers of low dose radiation, here. The polishing of mailboxes was done on 20 April 2012 to commemorate Japan's postal service.

New ways of dealing with fallout in Fukushima Prefecture, 21 April 2012. Image Source: Fukushima Minyu via EXSKF.

Nuclear Leaks 17: American Radiation Risks

Image Source: GoogleMaps via Common Dreams.

Common Dreams has a piece on the Natural Resources Defense Council's assessment of potential areas of fallout risk in North America around American nuclear power plants. The NRDC allows users to enter their zip code (here) to call up a Fukushima-like projection around their nearest plant.

It is the kind of thing that frightens people, but then again, the news out of the nuclear power industry is not very encouraging these days. Alarmist Preppers claim that North America is being hit with vast amounts of fallout, which they insist is being covered up by the government and mainstream media.  On the other hand, they confront the remarkable counter-factual logic of those who still think that nuclear energy will reduce humanity's carbon footprint. On 20 March 2012, Olivia Fermi argued for the Vancouver Observer that, "Nuclear energy [is] still looking good for climate change reduction post-Fukushima." One commenter thanked Olivia for championing, "clean nuclear energy."

That is not the line taken by Common Dreams, whose author focuses on conditions at American plants:

In the one year since the Fukushima nuclear disaster began, the Nuclear Regulator[y] Commission (NRC) has failed to enact any safety mandate for U.S. reactors, an oversight the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says is making 120 million Americans at an increased risk of radioactive impacts. The group's new U.S. nuclear fallout map shows the risk factors associated with the nation's plants and the radioactive plumes that would have occurred had an area been hit with a Fukushima-like disaster.

The NRC is criticized for its domestic nuclear management. This is the Website of the branch of the US Environmental Protection Agency that deals with nuclear emergency responses and radiation data testing. According to the NRDC, the following American nuclear plants had emergency shutdowns in 2011:

• Calvert Cliffs - Lusby, MD (due to hurricane)
• North Anna - Louisa, VA (due to earthquake)
• Ft Calhoun - Ft Calhoun, NE (due to flooding)
• Browns Ferry - Athens, AL (due to tornado)
• Surry - Surry, VA (due to tornado)

I have an earlier post, here, about a leak at the Grand Gulf Nuclear Plant in Mississippi in 2011. There were further problems at Grand Gulf in February 2012. The NRC recently penalized Fort Calhoun, Turkey Point, Florida and Catawba, South Carolina plants for violations. In March 2012, the NRC granted construction approval for two new nuclear plants in South Carolina. And on 10 April 2012, a report circulated on the Web that the US Military was stocking up on Potassium Iodide tablets to protect troops from radioactive fallout.

Nuclear Leaks 16: Chernobyl Anniversary - Wormwood Will Fall from the Sky

Control room in Chernobyl's Reactor #4. Image © (2005) Gerd Ludwig via Boston Globe.

Today is the 26th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Alla Yaroshinskaya, former Deputy to the USSR Supreme Soviet summed up the outcome: "The most dangerous element that came out of the Chernobyl reactor wasn't Cesium or Plutonium, but lies. The lie of '86, that's what I call it, a lie that was propagated like the radioactivity throughout the whole country and the entire world." Above, the control room of Chernobyl's Reactor #4 mirrrors worries about Fukushima's Reactor #4 (a number considered to be bad luck in Asia).

In 1986 and 1987, 240,000 liquidators and support workers passed through Chernobyl to contain the crisis. They were called biorobots. Ultimately, 600,000 people were recognized for their clean-up work; and according to the IAEA, there were 100,000 more who went unrecognized. Greenpeace claims that there was a total of 800,000 liquidators. National Geographic has some photographs of these workers here. The IAEA sees no direct correlation between their radiation exposure and their later cancer rates. Perhaps 40,000 are dead now, and some 100,000, now in their forties, are disabled and suffer from unending health problems, with about 4,000 dying every year. Their children exhibited a seven-fold increase in genetic mutations. Their predicament has not been systematically studied or fully acknowledged. The debate on the number of deaths caused by the accident is inconclusive to say the least: Chernobyl's total number of deaths lies somewhere between 43 people and 1 million people.

The liquidators' efforts cannot be underestimated; they prevented a second explosion and China Syndrome at Chernobyl, which could have rendered Europe uninhabitable. The sheer size of the workforce, the speed at which they had to work, the resources they needed, and the costs involved to contain the fallout at Chernobyl all make Fukushima's smaller, valiant total workforce at the one year point of around 18,000 extremely worrying. Chernobyl is widely considered to be one of the key factors which brought down the Soviet Union.

The main medal (here) given by Soviet authorities to liquidators features a drop of blood irradiated with alpha and beta particles and gamma rays. First responders additionally received a medal with Lenin on it. There are various other medals for special workers, such as firefighters, and anniversary medals (see also here). One commemorative medal features a pregnant woman on one side and a Chernobyl clock on the other. According to Wiki, liquidator medals have been available for sale since the 1990s in Belarussian, Ukrainian and Russian markets. As their recipients died, some medals were sold by surviving family members. They are also sold on the Internet by antique dealers.

Mythology, water spirits and radiation: Chornobyl (Artemisia vulgaris) roots were traditionally used to banish Slavonic water nymphs, or rusalky. This is: Renée Fleming singing Song of the Moon in Dvořák's Rusalka in a NY Met production. In folk medicine, overdosing on Chornobyl roots led to memory loss.

The Chernobyl disaster (described in this excellent documentary) has not just engendered lies. It has also become interwoven with popular culture and Biblical, Renaissance and Millennial eschatologies. It is, in fact, an object lesson in how engineering and scientific failures can easily and rapidly enter the realm of myth, symbols, superstitions and religious dreams. With Chernobyl, it happened almost immediately, starting with a July 1986 article in the New York Times, which associated the name of the exploded nuclear reactor with the Wormwood Star in the Bible's Book of Revelation. In this post, I trace a winding, very strange road to follow how the religious and linguistic etymology of the word 'Wormwood' contributed to the mythologizing of this nuclear event.

Look Skyward: The Lyrids

The Lyrids return. Image Source: Behind Astrography.

Tonight and especially tomorrow night (the night of 21-22 April) mark the peak of the Lyrids meteor shower. The meteors are visible from April 16 to 26, with their radiant in the constellation of Lyra, easy to view because the star Vega is located in it. Vega is the fifth brightest star in the whole night sky and the second brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere. As a relatively close star, Vega has long been studied and is widely considered by astronomers to be the most important star in the sky after the Sun.

Wiki comments that the "source of the meteor shower is the periodic Comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher." The shower was first recorded almost 700 years before the birth of Christ by a Chinese astronomer, and was noted in one of the earliest works of Chinese history, the Zuo Zhuan, which states: "On day xīn-mǎo of month 4 in the summer (of year 7 of King Zhuang of Lu), at night, fixed stars are invisible, at midnight, stars dropped down like rain. (夏四月辛卯 夜 恆星不見 夜中 星隕如雨)"

The best-viewing time listed in this pictorial is for the UK in 2011. Image Source: behindastrography.

While this is not a storm noted for many meteors at its peak, this is the first annual shower in 15 months where the moon has not been blocking the view.  The Lyrids are also known to have sudden bursts of meteors. To see them, look at this chart for viewing directions worldwide. In the Northeastern United States, Ontario, and Quebec, look Northeast from 11:30 p.m. and then East up to 4:30 a.m. EST. In the UK, look at the skies earlier in the evening.

Viewing later in the evening: look East. Image Source: Astronomy via Blogster.

The constellation of Lyra is the shower's radiant, between Hercules and Cygnus the Swan. Image Source: Living Moon Astrology.

Nuclear Leaks 15: Fukushima - Media Blackouts and Media Nightmares

Tape on Fukushima's leaky pipes. Image Source: AP via HuffPo.

Caption for the above photograph: "In this photo released by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), a section of a hose, top, from which tons of highly radioactive water appears to have leaked into the ocean, is seen covered with vinyl tape at the tsunami-hit Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan, Thursday, April 5, 2012. (AP Photo/Tokyo Electric Power Co.)"

Hello darkness, my old friend. Fukushima (福島) means 'Island of Bliss,' or 'Island of Good Fortune,' but every new headline contradicts the name of the prefecture and its crippled Daiichi power plants. 'Shima' means island, and ironically the homonym 'fuku' (拭く) means '(to) wipe or mop (up).'  Because Fukushima's enemy is invisible, there is a lot of leeway for interpretation about what is happening. Journalists and bloggers complain of an international media blackout, possibly requested for diplomatic reasons by the Japanese government. At the same time, officials are reluctant to explain what is happening and cause panic among citizens. They likely fear that anything they say now could inadvertently confirm later liabilities. Adam Broinowski comments:

Stories of tragedy, heroism, resilience and recovery filled the daily news ... [after the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami] ... [o]ne local from the area responded in poetry: The stars were amazingly beautiful, but I saw fire burning red beneath the black sky in the east. It was silent, but we could hear explosions somewhere, and the smell of burning was in the air. The Fukushima meltdowns have long been in gestation and were finally born from a movement of ocean and earth. Not so much an historical caesura as its ‘3/11' naming suggests, Fukushima is a re-telling of an old story, only in capitals.

Since 1971, Fukushima Daiichi's weaknesses have grown out of hubris and complacency, which persisted despite decades of international warnings (see here, here and here). Considering the noise against the nuclear industry and nuclear weapons in the 1970s and 1980s, the silence from the media now is deafening. The world's greatest ever environmental disaster is unfolding. Where are political environmental talkers, like Al Gore, who was all over the press a few years ago about global warming and melting ice caps? Why isn't a documentary film-maker political activist like Michael Moore getting to the bottom of corporate secrets in the nuclear industry in America? Silence, like a cancer, grows. Our words like silent raindrops fall, and echo in wells of silence.

MSM silence around Fukushima is a real problem. Local media and wire services are reporting events at the plants, but MSM news programs do not give the information high profile coverage. This silence is creating an information vacuum, increasingly filled by Internet chatter, and the latter exhibits troubling signs.

Hence, Fukushima is becoming a prime example of how the Internet is shaping Millennial consciousness. The Internet is now a strategic - possibly a decisive - factor in any unfolding disaster, because it can alter the generally perceived context of a crisis in the blink of an eye. In a similar way, the power of the Internet was initially demonstrated after 9/11, when online communications allowed 9/11 to become the subject of malevolent second-guessing of governmental, political and social authorities; Cyberspace, which was supposed to become the ultimate source of renewed democratic freedoms, enabled toxic reinterpretations of an increasingly frayed reality.

The first decade of the 2000s confirm that the media lessons of 9/11 were not lost on politicians and power-brokers, nor equally on little people, who realized that social networking and online media tools allowed them to craft the cachet of micro-fame. In this atmosphere, fake or ignorant online sincerity about a disaster looks more authentic than that of unplugged-in people, like the workers at Fukushima, who struggle to contain the actual disaster, and who may die trying to protect us.

Why would cyber-citizens trust their friendly neighbourhood online conspiracy theorist more than the representatives they elected to office? The very act of questioning authority on the Internet now bequeaths automatic, unsubstantiated and false credibility to any cyber-personality who bothers to engage that trope. And while some commentators are sincere and trying to engage in the world around them for the common good, others have agendas; and still others are wolves in sheep's clothing.