There are several reasons to explain why last month’s 7.0 earthquake in Haiti killed over 200,000 people, while the death toll from Chile’s much more powerful 8.8 magnitude quake is not expected to rise much above a thousand or two, but part of the credit surely goes to the tough building codes the Chilean government has enforced for the past few decades.
You know, the sort of intrusive, government regulations that drive up costs in the private sector.
I’m just sayin’.
Those terrible and burdensome government regulations once again saved lives, kept the water clean and the air from being fouled.
Rightwingnuts forget all this in their pointless tirades against government.
I wonder if the countless millions of dead people from places like Stalin’s Russia, Castro’s Cuba, Maos’ China, etc….would agree with the premise that “socialism saves lives”.
govt regulations hardly equal “socialism”, especially when talking about building codes…LMFAO….
and BTW, most “socialist” nations have lower building code standards…just saying…
Goldy quotes a Cal-Berkeley prof–
Certainly if all buildings were required to be able to withstand an 8.8 magnitude earthquake, they would be safer when the quake hits.
Any idea of the cost related to doing so??
More government bureaucracy, building costs etc. While what happened in both country’s is tragic and sad…you have failed to address once again Goldy the COST of your Save the World no matter what the cost dream.
People have died in the little Electric Cars. Should they be banned…or forced to be built like Sherman Tanks??
And where in the world would a poor country like Haiti get the money to Earthquake proof all their buildings??
Just a small detail KLOWNS cannot deal with..
Cost and how do you pay for it??
Do tell Goldy…I’m askin’
@2 Don’t you understand that Goldy is mocking you? Given the reckless abandon with which wingers have flung around the word “socialism” during the last couple years, someone like you coming along and presuming to conduct a teaching moment on the definition of “socialism” is laughable.
[rabbits snickering in background]
@4…yes, I understand the context…dont you understand that I am mocking people like you?
fail.
Socialist country’s do lack the Earthquake-proof world Goldy desires. You think all the old buildings in N. European Socialist Country’s are Earthquake proof?
Hey, how about DOWNTOWN SEATTLE?
When the big one hits, hundreds of small buildings will collapse Goldy.
Why not focus on your own cesspool and demand ALL downtown Building Owners immediate pay to retrofit their buildings!!
They cannot afford it…but demand it anyway.
Childish Goldy.
When your Dream City cannot even protect it’s people from an 8.8 earthquake, why look overseas?
5 Years Ago, Madame Gregoire prophesized the Alaska Way Viaduct was doomed to collapse.
She needs to vlean her crystal ball…and get a more environmentally friendly broom.
#2 That’s actually a good point. Socialism + crazy murderous leader equals death. But capitalism plus crazy murderous leader equal death. ANYTHING run by a crazy murderous leader equals death. The Greeks and Romans had the ‘original’ Democracies, and plenty of slaves and death.
Canada on the other hand is more socialist and the us, and no millions have been slaughtered.
We probably have some of the highest building standards in the world, and they’re nearly ALL socialist (enforced by local, state or Federal guidelines and laws).
#7 That wasn’t “Madame Gregoire” making that up, that was EVERYONE…every structural engineer who has EVER looked at the viaduct says it WILL collapse whenever we have our next 6+ earthquake. Or has some invisible magical being told you otherwise in a dream?
#6 Wow, reality NEVER gets in the way of a Republican magical argument. Facts just don’t matter.
Most northern European buildings aren’t super earthquake proof, because they’re not in regular earthquake zones…same with say, St. Louis here in the U.S. But places, like Seattle or Tokyo, that are in COMMON earthquake zones, always have stronger guidelines. Just simple reality. Man you’re dense.
Do you pay attention to reality, ever? Seattle buildings HAVE been retro fitted for earthquake issues? Didn’t you notice? Did you see all the construction at SeaTac when they added all those extra cross beams a few years ago? I’ve seen dozens and dozens of buildings ‘fixed’ in the last 20 years. You might need to get out of your parents basement and see the city a little.
What are you saying? That since we can’t protect against and 8.8 earthquake (no one really can) we shouldn’t strengthen our buildings at ALL? But we DO have more common 6, or 7 earthquakes, shouldn’t we design for those?
9. Alki Postings spews:
You are telling me that ALL the downtown area old brick buildings have been Retro-fitted
so they will be safe in a 6 or 7 earthquake??
How is Smith Tower looking? How about the hundreds of small buildings outside the Modern Skyscraper core??
Hey Goldy–
You think the Seattle Tunnel Fiasco will be as good as this one your Russian Komrades built?
Watch this!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fLW3OiH8OQ
Another stupid thread posted for The Dumb Bunny to make ridiculous rants.
Ever been to Haiti, HA Libtardos? Nope didn’t think so. How about the Dumb Bunny? Maybe in his dreams like his past commentary on Haiti, Cuyahoga County, Ohio and Stafford County, Virginia. Stupid… Stupid… and MORE STUPID!
Alki, God forbid we’d see an 8.8 earthquake… Wait a minute… HA Libtardos don’t believe in God. Anyway, if one happens we’ll see what retrofitting does vs. building them from the ground up to withstand one that large.
Cynical, nice video. You know how those city dwellers drive…
Puddy–
That video is Seattle Socialism at it’s finest.
Let’s be like Russia.
Oh and Goldy–
As for your friends in Chile–
OUT OF CONTROL LOOTING! They have had to bring the Army in! Socialism at it’s finest…right?
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,587616,00.html
I’m just reportin’
@8….the fact that we have building codes has nothing to do with being “socialist” or “capitalist”, or any sort of “ist”.
FFS people, get a grip.
please, do yourself a favor and look up the definition of “socialism”
having building codes has NOTHING to do with taking peoples hard earned money and redistributing it.
and NO, not all seattle buildings have been seismicaly retrofitted…not even close. Most of the public buildings have(schools, etc), but the majority of other structures have not – unless they have gone through a major remodel.
LMAO!!! BIAW would love that one.. McCabe would snort, “Who said that? Some “limp-wristed” Seattle librul???”
Goldie, Chile brutally murdered many socialists while Nixon still strode White House hallways, and that dictatorship ruled for decades. Good thing they had good engineers around to implement good rules.
Alki Postings 8 & 9, what you said.
Mr Cynical @10, AP didn’t say ALL, but progress has been made. Private ownership will invest or not, and if they think that the property and lives are fungible they’ll let the improvements slide. How is the structure where you work, and do you know the owners or in what place they can be found? And that video? Never would you have seen such inept driving while that caricature of socialism was in place prior to the gangster capitalism that has replaced it. Poor Russia does not have an aptitude for government in any system. One other thing, I’ve missed your prior pronouncements on the “Seattle Tunnel Fiasco” (which is being pushed hard by the decidedly capitalist downtown and Port business interests), so you are against the business friendly tunnel? If it does get built, the Russian tunnels, whatever the quality of driving within them, did withstand the bombing the Germans did when they approached the city, I doubt the doomed viaduct would last 5 minutes of that, or the next earthquake, which in this city could be happening before lunch today.
It would be funny to agree on the tunnel, strange bedfellows. Keep on your side of the bed.
Once again, the conservatives try to confuse the dictatorship of Russia with the word “Socialist” in the name, with the actual concept of socialism.
You know, socialist countries of Holland, Denmark, or Finland.
Worried about drunken crony capitalists driving overpowered carbon wasters at high speed and less than adequate control? Via the baby blue cherub, the
1933 Seattle Streetcar map. If only they had been maintained, or replaced with a sensibly-financed monorail. Forward into the past.
I get where the headline of “Socialism saves lives” comes from.
We seem to have developed this dichotomy in this country where these words now mean:
Capitalism = “No regulations for Nuthin! The invisible hand of the Market rules all.”
Socialism = “Rules and regulations limit Capitalism for the good of ALL society, even if profits suffer a bit.”
@9 FYI
St Louis is in a major earthquake zone.
As someone who designs the life-safety systems for high-rises and healthcare facilities and who has been involved in seismic design for decades, I’d just like to say that our Klynical KLOWN just has to be about the dumbest twit on the entire planet. Not that that would ever stop him from flapping his trap on a subject on which he is so completely and utterly ignorant. Oh Lord, please spare us this incoherent, ignorant and babbling fool of a man.
Mark Centz, if we had maintained the network of what we replaced those streetcars with, would be much better. Not all the streetcar routes were replaced with trackless trolleys, some were replaced with (at the time) gasoline and (later) Diesel powered motor buses, but still the Trolleybuses covered at least up to N. 85th Street.
http://www.seattle.gov/transpo.....nsit.htm#3
(They got both the 1963 and 2005 Trolleybus maps, although should be updated for 2010 to include the extensions of the 14-Mt. Baker to Mt. Baker Transit Center and 36-Beacon Hill route to Othello Station, which opened late last year).
Now as for the Earthquake preparedness, I found it hard to believe those stringent building codes withstood the Pinochet Regime, supposedly everything about it was pro-free market policies when it came to the economic side. God thing they did, or the death toll would be much higher.
Look at how Hawaii weathered this, they had more than a couple hours warning, issued the alert about 1:30AM local time(2 hours behind Pacific Standard Time), sirens blared at 6AM, plenty of time in advance of when the first waves hit, and thankfully were only 6 feet high at the most, around 11AM.
http://www.honoluluadvertiser......27047/1352
Looking at the footage online and on TV, they were showing the evacuation of the beaches, and those socialist Fire trucks going around blasting the evacuation warnings to those who did not see them on TV or Radio, or heard the sirens. Although if a Tsunami is triggered from an Earthquake off Chile, chances are Hilo(on the BIg Island, which I have alse heard has been called Hawaii itself in the past) will bear the brunt, with the 1960 Tsunami killing 61 people, and nearly 150 killed by a Tsunami there in 1946.
The Navy headed the warning, and put the ships to see at Pearl Harbor, only the news media was showing the one ship that can’t be moved from Pearl Harbor, the Battleship Missouri.
@16 “Who said that? Some “limp-wristed” Seattle librul???”
LMFAO! Good one, YLB.
22, good point. In fact, the New Madrid fault has been known to produce some of the most destructive quakes over the years, fortunately not too many settlements were around at the time, but they had a series of quakes around 1811-1812 that actually reversed the flow of the Mississippi River for awhile.
Yo Steve! Any familiarity with the challenges of seismic design for chemical and power plants?
Funny that most of the nuclear power plants in this country are east of the Mississippi. Japan had a HUGE power plant go down after an earthquake. 7 reactors. Last I heard it was still down after 20/30 billion yen spent.
I’d love to see the world adopt molten salt reactor technology for cheap, rock bottom electricity, industrial process heat, water desalinization, liquid fuel synthesis, ammonia fertilizer production, etc.. But there’s those pesky seismic issues..
Mark Centz @ 17 spews:
Absolutely. Always have been. Tunnels almost NEVER come in at Budget. Way too many contingencies. I was and still am for retro-fitting the existing HISTORIC structure. Anyway, no matter what the Seattle Leftist Krowd dreams up, it’s all gonna collapse anyway when the Cascadian Faultine cuts loose sometime in the next 20 years.
BTW..
Alki Postings snidely said this–
The implication is clearly that there has been a big untertaking in this area. The fact is…there has not. If the Cascadian Faultline rips a 9.0…syonara. Seattle’s fill will turn to Jello and the Atheist Progressives will have their dream…lights out/permanently! So no need for them to worry about it..right?
23. Steve spews:
So Steve, what are you saying specifically.
I know new buildings and healthcare facilities have seismic protection to some level.
My point was about all the other buildings. The old ones of which there are hundreds and hundreds. I know some have been retrofit. What % is the question.
Someone can allude the progress has been made if merely one had been upgraded. In talking with several downtown property owners, the reality is that few building owners could afford the cost of designing and doing something meaning.
Your take———–
20. Mark Centz spews:
Worried about drunken crony capitalists driving overpowered carbon wasters at high speed and less than adequate control?
I would be willing to bet that my 620hp “carbon waster” not only spews less CO2, but it probably also gets better mileage than your 15 year old beat-to-shit Toyota….
just sayin… :)
Oops, I’m too late. I, also, was going to refer to the New Madrid Fault.
But getting back to the original subject: despite constant efforts to build straw men of the opposition’s positions, few people are on one extreme or the other. Most believe in regulation at some level or another.
In fact, commercial activity would cease altogether if there was not at least some regulation which facilitates commerce (uniform weights and measures, payment standards, enforcement of contracts obligations, etc.).
In fact, many businesses rejoice in convincing government to regulate and enforce one area of the economy, but refrain from enforcing another area which benefits them. As an extreme example, you could see sellers which pursue enforcement of long-term contracts for everything from gym memberships to timeshare ownership, but refrain from enforcing the sales tactics in those industries.
Similarly, someone in the building industry might want some level of regulation which keeps out the lower-priced competition, but still allows the builder to make a larger profit by pushing some of the expense on either the ultimate buyer, his neighbors, or the community at large.
And occasionally, we get those who believe that regulations are something that only should apply to OTHER PEOPLE, not themselves, and sometimes are willing to engage in a little bribery or enfluence-peddling to make that happen.
What Goldy is effectively lampooning is the occasional knee-jerk wingnut response that virtually any regulation is a governmental intrusion into private affairs or business. You know, the sort of argument idiots like Glen Beck would make, as he characterized virtually ANY regulations as being “socialism”.
Now, whether we should be enforcing building regulations designed to withstand a 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, or 9.0 earthquake is a fair question. Obviously, we cannot afford to tear everything down and re-build to withstand a 10.0 level earthquake within a few months, no matter how many lives might be saved in the process.
But what we CAN do is use our best scientific analysis to determine the most likely level of earthquake over the life of a new building, and insist upon design standards to match. As for older buildings, we might set a lower standard for retrofit based upon the likely level of earthquake during the remaining lifespan of that building, the number of occupants of that building, etc.
But what is NOT helpful is to call such attempts “socialist”, or even “fascist”, as some wingnuts are more than happy to do.
lebowski @30 admits that his car is up on blocks:
Yep, immobile cars use zero gallons and spew no carbon dioxide.
But they don’t get you out of your mom’s basement either.
@31
But what is NOT helpful is to call such attempts “socialist”, or even “fascist”, as some wingnuts are more than happy to do.
Agreed. But at the same time, blaming a lack of buildings codes on “the free market” is just as erronous, as some leftwing nuts are more than happy to do.
The fact that building codes exist has nothing to do with govt models.
@32…lol.
rhp–
A reasoned response.
You are right…few people insist on no regulations. The tricky part is where to draw the line. Bureaucrats & lawyers have a vested interested in regulations. Job-creating capitalists…not so much.
Al Gore’s response in yesterday’s NY Times however, shows that there is a movement to use regulations not to address a defined environmental need…but to falsify scientific data to move forward their agenda.
Think about Gore’s Comment here—
Gore calls intentionally falsifying data a mere “mistake”….rather than an intentional act of fraud on those who rely on the data to make projections.
When Gore tries to marginalize or minimize something like this…it makes it worse.
See my point?
By the way, the best long-term solution in Haiti is for the government to effectively enforce building codes. But that has stymied in the past by (a) the extreme poverty in the nation, where many can barely pull together enough money to build a non-re-enforced mud-brick house, and (b) a culture of government corruption, going back to the Duvaliers and perhaps even earlier, and (3) the immediate need for shelter, causing some Haitians to already begun rebuilding in the same manner as before, and (4) questionable title to the property upon which some buildings sit (thereby discouraging investments in more than a temporary building).
Unable to do more, the Haitian government has simply resorted to de-populating the capital by moving refugee camps well out of the city, and encouraging residents to go back to their ancestoral villages & farms. Of course, unless they are willing to re-impose tariffs on farm products, the people will end up back in the city in order to find a way to live.
One possible solution I heard advocated over the weekend: Loans from U.S. charities which would financing the re-building of small homes and businesses. A condition of the loan would be that (a) the title to the property needs to be clear, and (b) no funds are released except upon frequent progress inspections by the charity, to ensure that building standards are being followed. The loan would be taken out by the builder, who would have to pay off the loan before receiving another one. The goal would be to provide safe housing, but also to finance and train native contractors and crews on reliable construction techniques.
@36…well said.
Neo-socialist JD is in town. Did KUED this morning, doing Benaroya later, swooning over Cuba, tying himself in knots about Papua, having a gorebasm about global warming, predicting that Cyn’s Montana will turn toxic and die. My notes about his greatest hit, which is a miss:
This book’s punchiest lines come near the end when the author settles scores with a corpse, Julian Simon’s. While living, Mr. Simon had bad manners; he made ideologues such as Paul Ehrlich and Jared Diamond look foolish by fumigating their smelly orthodoxies and pieties. Now that Simon is safely dead and can’t fight back, Dr. Diamond gets mad and gets even. “All of our current problems,” he writes, “are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology. The rapid advances in technology during the 20th century have been creating difficult new problems faster than they have been solving old problems …”
“All” of our current problems? Julian Simon would be ready to rumble with Diamond on that one. During the 20th Century, technology almost doubled developed-world lifespans and pulled up developing-world lifespans and lives. Increased lifespan during a period of almost-exponentially increasing population was thought to be impossible before the technological 20th Century. Just ask Malthus.
Then Diamond writes this: “An even larger fraction of the world’s original wetlands than of its forests has already been destroyed, damaged, or converted …” Original? What point of origin does he mean? Big Bang? Formless & void? Pangaea? Diamond is entitled to draw his own baseline for his assertion, but he should tell us what it is.
Some of the things Dr. Diamond tells us are right-on right, particularly his chapters on busines; he’s more incisive as an economist than as a scientist. Parts of his intro chapter on Montana are also good. He’s plowing old trails plowed under about Montana as a plundered province of extractive industry, but he plows well the parts about hard rock mining (still operating under 1872 rules — that’s why toxic heavy metals were permitted to pool behind dams a few miles from Missoula’s water supply — and about water allocation regimes adapted badly to the arid west.
He’s unconvincing & unreliable about Montana agriculture, logging, and climate change. Here is how Diamond discusses the climatological collapse of the Big Hole Valley south of Missoula: ” … (I)t’s difficult to recognize that each successive year is on the average slightly worse than the year before, so one’s baseline standard for what constitutes “normalcy” shifts gradually and imperceptibly. …”
Reading further in the excerpt shows that Diamond’s baseline standard for what constitutes normal is Diamond’s own experience. Old boomers will be flattered that his baseline decade for identifying subsequent shifts and deviations from the norm into the abnormal and the “worse” is also their decade, the 1950s, but it’s most peculiar that a Pulitzer-winning scientist didn’t check his egocentricity at the door. Anything can be proved, or nothing, depending on where the lines and baselines are drawn.
There was human activity and climate in western Montana before young Jared Diamond first hiked to snow fields in the Big Hole. And there was climate, changing, before people from somewhere moved in about 12,000 years ago when the landscape was dominated by ice. About 8000 years ago climate changed so assiduously toward warmth that there’s little evidence that anyone lived in Montana or much of the west for 2000 or 3000 years. Had Diamond drawn his baseline then, the “worsening” abnormal climate he sees in 2005 would look, in comparison, like global cooling.
In recent times there was a prolonged period of hemispheric global cooling that coincided with the collapse of the 450-year Norse settlements in Greenland to which Diamond compares the collapse of Montana “civilization” as we know it. The Little Ice Age, mimicking the big ice ages that dominated global climate for most of the last 100,000 years (our data for that baseline come from Greenland ice cores that Diamond hardly talks about) faded away by about 1850 -1900, and we’ve reverted to one of those rare warm interludes that suduced the Norse into settling Greenland during one of those rare interludes when Greenland was green.
Greenland’s 100,000-year database correlates with what’s known or suspected about hemispheric or global trends, and suggests that cooling was so dominant and destructive that human civilization, something apparently unprecedented in our multi-million-year evolution, gained a grip only when climate belatedly deviated away from the cold norm (overheated anomalies facing paleo Montanans and — in 200-year cycles — Mayans, excepted). Here’s Diamond’s discussion of Greenland’s collapsing climate, for which the only constant is change; all the pre-industrial changes he recounts are inconvenient for his later assertions about technology-driven global warming:
“(W)e can reconstruct past Greenland climates from Icelandic records, pollen, and ice cores, and the latter let us reconstruct climate on a year-to-year basis. … (W)e’ve learned that the climate warmed up after the end of the last Ice Age around 14,000 years ago; the fjords of Greenland became merely “cool,” not bitterly cold,” and they developed low forests. But Greenland’s climate hasn’t remained boringly steady for the last 14,000 years: it has gotten colder for some periods, then reverted to being milder again. …
“Hence the history of the Arctic, including that of Greenland, is a history of people arriving, occupying large areas for many centuries, and then declining or disappearing or having to change their lifestyle over large areas when climate changes bring changes in prey abundance. Such consequences of climate changes for native hunters have been observed firsthand in Greenland during the 20th century. A warming of sea temperatures early in that century caused seals almost to disappear from southern Greenland. Good seal hunting returned when the weather got cooler again. Then, when the weather got very cold between 1959 and 1974, populations of migratory seal species plummeted …
“Similar climate fluctuations with consequent changes in prey abundance may have contributed to the first settlement by Native Americans around 2500 B.C., their decline or disappearance around 1500 B.C., their subsequent return, their decline again, and then their complete abandonment of southern Greenland some time before the Norse arrived around A.D. 980. Hence the Norse settlers initially encountered no Native Americans [but the Inuit returned, ‘with big consequences for the Norse’, during the warming period around A.D. 1200.]
“Between A.D. 800 and 1300, ice cores tell us that the climate in Greenland was relatively mild, similar to Greenland’s weather today or even slightly warmer. Those mild centuries are termed the Medieval Warm Period. Thus, the Norse reached Greenland during a period good for growing hay and pasturing animals — good by the standards of Greenland’s average climate over the last 14,000 years. Around 1300, though, the climate in the North Atlantic began to get cooler and more variable from year to year, ushering in a cold period termed the Little Ice Age that lasted into the 1800s. By around 1420, the Little Ice Age was in full swing, and the increased summer drift ice between Greenland, Iceland, and Norway ended ship communicaiton between the Greenland Norse and the outside world. Those cold conditions were tolerable or even beneficial for the Inuit … (W)hy didn’t the Norse learn to cope with the Little Ice Age’s cold weather by watching how the Inuit were meeting the same challenges? …
“What about relations between the Inuit and the Norse? Incredibly, during the centuries that those two peoples shared Greenland, Norse annals include only two or three brief references to the Inuit. (A) 15th-dentury manuscript explains how the Norse first encountered Greenland natives: ‘Farther to the north beyond the Norse settlements, hunters have come across small people, whom they call skraelings. When they are stabbed with a nonfatal wound, their wounds turn white and they don’t bleed, but when they are mortally wounded, they bleed incessantly. They have no iron, but they use walrus tusks as missiles and sharp stones as tools.'”
** [In fact, nothing in the scant record shows that this was a first encounter. Nor does the ‘brief reference’ state that a Norse colonist stabbed an Inuit colonist, but Diamond leaps to that conclusion.]
“Brief and matter-of-fact as this account is, it suggests that the Norse had a “bad attitude” that got them off to a dreadful start with the people with whom they were about to share Greenland. “Skrailings,” the Old Norse word that the Norse applied to all three groups of New World natives that they encountered in Vinland or Greenland (Inuit, Dorset, and Indians), translates approximately as “wretches.” It also bodes poorly for peaceful relations if you take the first Inuit or Dorset person whom you see, and you try atabbing him as an experiment to figure out how much he bleeds. Recall .., that when the Norse first encountered a group of Indians in Vinland, they initiated friendship by killing eight of the nine. These first contacts go a long way towards explaining why the Norse did not establish good trading relationship with the Inuit. … If you hope to persuade an Inuit woman … you have to establish a friendly relationship in the first place.
“But we have seen that the Norse had a “bad attitude” from the beginning, referring to both North American Indians in Vinland and Inuit in Greenland as “wretches,” and killing the first natives they encountered in both places. As church-oriented Christians, the Norse shared the scorn of pagans widespread among medieval Europeans … Still another factor behind their bad attitude is that the Norse would have thought of themselves as the natives in the Nordrseta, and the Inuit as the interlopers. The Norse arrived in the Nordrseta and hunted there for several centuries before the Inuit arrived. … ”
Nothing in Diamond’s thin narrative supports these conclusions. Nothing in the scant written record of Norse/”native” contact supports either the ‘bad attitude’ assertion or the assertion that these were first contacts. Nothing supports the conclusion that Norse Christians initiated contact with the “Other” by killing him. Diamond displays ignorance & arrogance here, together with fashionable anti-Christian bigotry and bias. I cannot say that Greenland and Vinland didn’t happen the way he pretends they happened. I’m saying only that, using Diamond’s own evidence, Diamond is pretending. He’s stretching the scientific record like Silly Putty to assert things that the record doesn’t prove.
And I believe he’s dabbling in reverse racism, the currently fashionable supposition that, in any interaction between the melanin-deprived and the melanin-enhanced, the pale people are at fault. This is the flip side of fashionable racism from a century ago when eugenicists such as Theodore Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger believed and preached that civilization was the special project of God’s special people, pasty-white, Anglo-Saxon, Nordic northern European Americans.
If only arrogant and ignorant whites had listened, Diamond seems to sigh; if only they had learned from the dark-skinned invaders (not one culture, but many, and all as transient as the pallid Norse) who drifted through their changing seasons. Arrogant and ignorant whites built an improbable cow culture that lasted 450 years, through global warming and global cooling, until it crashed in the crushing years after 1350. Diamond calls it a failure because it crashed like the failed cow-centered culture of Montana. I call it a success because it lasted almost 500 years.
Why did Greenland finally fail? Why did it collapse near the year 1350?
It’s strange that that the author of Guns, Germs and Steel gives negligible credit to germs for the collapse of Greenland. In pages of stuff about the settlements and the settlers bad attitudes, Diamond gives one part of one sentence to the plague of 1350, and seems curiously incurious about the plague’s effect on the Greenland Norse or on the Norse of Norway. Did the plague touch Greenland? How did it affect trade patterns with the home country & other Viking colonies? Diamond doesn’t say. He doesn’t even ask.
Our best guess is that the Black Death of 1350 killed over half of white Norway and even more of the Norse in Greenland. That’s how Greenland collapsed, I guess, and not from arrogant cultural imperialism. Although I enjoyed & learned much from parts of Diamond’s book, the rest made me want to hurl: a rock, my lunch, or the book.
@38–
OMIGOD!
I’m a good 200 miles away from the Big Hole Valley. This sounds like a funny read. Al Gorebasm is alive & well…HE IS EVERYWHERE with his Nobel Prize for Fiction and Bullshit.
What an absolute disgrace.
BTW, I love lefty’s who are wisely shifting the focus away from MANMADE Climate Change to real data and History. It must be enlightening for them to leave the fantasy World According to Gorebasm.
But remember all, intentionally phoneying up scientific data is only a mere mistake!!
Algore is a real stitch and a half!
@38…post of the day…
38: I’ve heard the mini-ice age espoused as a theory for the collapse of Viking settlments in Greenland before. The cold winters (and very short & mild summers) deprived their limited livestock of grazing lands, caused the cod to migrate southward out of their reach, and left them without any of their traditional food resources.
The Inuit natives could survive using centuries-old skills to hunt wales, walrus, and birds (and the willingness to eat things the Vikings rejected). But it was a marginal subsistance existance which the Vikings wouldn’t have tolerated for long, and as noted, the Vikings were unwilling to learn from their “inferiors” in any event.
The final collapse/depopulation of the Viking settlements in Greenland could have been from several direct sources: starvation, disease incidental to starvation, disease itself, or loss on the high seas in a desperate attempt to flee their inevitable fate if they remained. But all evidence points to a failure of the food supplly, due in large part to the mini-ice age.
In Europe the mini-ice age also had devastating effects, but the populations were able to eventually evolve their food and farming techniquest to accomodate them. The introduction of potatoes to Europe (an American crop) offered an alternative staple to grain, which tended to fail when cold, driving rain appeared before harvest. In northern Europe and Britain, wine was replaced by beer as the drink of choice (grapevines tended not to do well in cold weather).
Of course, we aren’t immune to such changes. I heard a presentation on NPR last week (I didn’t catch the guy’s name) by a fellow who outlined how a 3-foot rise in sea level would impact the food supplies of the world. He pointed out that the major rice crops along the Mekong Delta, Louisianna, and South Carolina would be largly inundated by salt water, rendering them incapable of being used for food production for centuries. Likewise, the pumping of water from fossile aquafirs in the central U.S. and elsewhere is depleting those aquafirs at such a rapid rate that they will be unsable for irrigation before the mid-point of this century. The combined effect could be a reduction in food production worldwide by as much as 1/3, causing massive starvation and military/political disruptions which might accompany such shortages.
Al Gore is the Too-Big Business the left keeps warning us about.
Good reply, rhp. You’re certainly correct that Greenland’s Norse collapse had many causes, but the plague c. 1350 probably topped the list.
Dr. Diamond seems more intent on grinding axes than on looking at the almost-certain consequences of Europe’s abrupt loss of ~40% of its population. Greenland’s losses, although delayed, were probably higher.
Right-wing trash-talk radio had fun with the president’s annual medical report this morning. Alcoholic Glenn Beck noted that a little phrase, unnoticed by Big Media, is worth noticing.
The phrase is an admonishment advising the president to moderate his alcohol intake.
Think that would have been mostly unreported about a Republican president? Old alcoholic GWB would certainly have been fried and flayed if a presidential physical told him to cut down, so think about his old man or Reagan, closer analogies to Obama in matters of drivin’ to drinkin’, but not smoking … Obama does, they didn’t.
Either Reagan or GHWB would have been skewered for being told to cut down. Am sure of it. Jon Stewart and half of what’s left of leftwing radio would be whipping up a froth about Republican President Drunky McPukeshoes. Am sure of it.
45 – The National Enquirer reported many times that Dumbya went back on the bottle
Don’t believe the Enquirer? It was good enough for Edwards wasn’t it?
Good enough for Edwards.
KUED = KUOW. Isht.
rhp6033… you are better than this.
Goldy’s attempt at lampooning regulations falls on his face because certain regulations such as seismic enhancements in subduction zones and home building attachment clips for hurricane zones are approved by all people, liberal and conservative. Safety isn’t a political issue except to progressives, of course.
This is a dumb thread just right for the Dumb Bunny.
rhp6033@36,
Well written post@36. One of our church leaders was sent to Haiti 1 Feb 2010 to coordinate some of what you suggested. Unfortunately he ran into Haitian red tape. Remember the Haitian fool who blocked relief supplies because he wasn’t getting his kickback? Our friend ran into that stuff. It’s sad really sad they react to money and not living conditions.
@46….I bet you believe their pictures of Rat-boy and his gill-sack too….
we get another glimpse into the life of YLB: reading the national enquirer.
LMFAO @ “am sure of it”……
Puddy @ 49: One of the problems with solving rampant corruption is that it is seldom just a problem of corrupt individuals. In countries such as Haiti, it tends to be systemic.
I once heard it explained this way. In Vietnam, the U.S. and ARVN forces were hard-pressed to defend every small hamlet from VC intrusion. So they started their own “collectivization” campaign (although they could hardly call it that – it was called “Home Villages”, or something of the sort.) It simply required peasants to abandon their ancestoral homes to live in larger villages, ostensibly easier to defend, and to go out to work the fields only during the daytime. Like most things, it seemed a good idea at the time, but it had lots of unintended consequences, most of which we won’t bother to discuss right now.
Of course, these re-located peasants had to live somewhere in the “Home Villages”, so the U.S. supplied the materials from which homes could be built. But the materials were under the control of the village chief, who would sell the materials rather than give them out as intended.
When one U.S. advisor objected, his ARVN counterpart explained the system to him. At the highest levels of governmetn in Saigon, each provencial chief was required to submit many hundreds of thousands of dollars as a fee for keeping their job. They, in turn, required those under them to submit a smaller fee to them, and so on. The village chiefs really had no choice – they had to indulge in such economic crimes as bribery, etc. in order to keep the flow of money heading upward.
In a way, it was an indirect form of taxation/user fees upon the population in a society where there is little record of monetary transactions, so no taxation could be realistically enforced. Each government agent becomes a collector of sort, making sure that they take in enough money to earn their keep, as well as forwarding a significant share upward along the line. You want a permit? You have to pay the “official fee” plus the “unofficial fee”.
That is one of the reasons why systemic corruption is so hard to change. It’s not always an issue of individual honesty or greed. It’s simply how the system is set up.
50. lebowski spews:
He pulls them out of his neighbor’s recycling bin…so he’s always behind on the news.
Heck, he probably just found out about Eliot Spitzer’s hooker frenzy.
What wingnut didn’t crow over Edwards being exposed in the Enquirer?
Did all those right wing foaming at the mouth sheep put down the Enquirer for that?
But Shrubya going back on the bottle? – naaaah….
IOKIYAR..
Committing malpractice on the English language, “Playing Doctor” @45:
The phrase is no such thing. Here’s the entire one-sentence paragraph from the report (PDF):
It’s a list of health behaviors for the President to continue — continue trying to quit smoking, continue exercising, continue eating right, continue moderate alcohol, continue going to the dentist.
Any other interpretation of the plain language of that paragraph is utterly without merit, utterly misleading, utterly inflamatory, utterly erroneous. IOW, precisely what one would expect from Beck and Drudge.
Rock @ 44: Is there any evidence to suggest that the Black Plague actually visited the Norse settlements in Greenland? It was a pretty remote community, with only a few limited visits by boat during the summer. It might have avoided the plague entirely. I haven’t heard any references to the black plague in the history of Greenland, but there is plenty of writing about how the weather grew worse and the affects on the food supply. By 1350 A.D., the Viking settlements were primarily Christian and literate (their wedding ceremonies were conducted by priests, most of whom were literate in Latin).
@55: OK.
Pinochet and Friedman (Milton, not Kinky) saved lives. We’re just sayin’.
(Looks like the link didn’t link, so get it at today’s WSJ. Article by Bret Stephens.)