‘The wisdom to know the difference’ - that’s what the Serenity prayer asks for.
You can’t stop earthquakes. Going to happen. Nothing you can do.
You can’t stop man-made things breaking down. Going to happen. Nothing you can do.
The difference between the earthquake and the man-made thing is that we don’t have to make the man-made thing. Just watch now as the world’s media and politicians make a great big hoo-haa about how maybe it’s not a good idea to build nuclear power plants on tectonic faults, but that’s not the story.
They’ll present a united front pretending that it is the story, because building nuclear power plants on tectonic faults is evidently an astonishingly stupid idea. It makes great newspaper copy and excellent TV, with explosions that you can show thousands of times. You can advertise your rolling news channel showing these explosions over and over again, interspersed with shots of boats on rooftops and oil refineries ablaze, and then lead into the ad break with a tag something akin to ‘Sky news - Closer to the suffering’.
Murdoch makes me nauseous. Suffering is not a product. It’s an emotion. Try one, Rupert. You might like one.
But my petty and peculiar dislikes are not the story either. The story is that man-made things will break down, and so it’s never a good idea to build a nuclear power plant, because as sure as you farted today, it’ll break down tomorrow.
Over the last couple of years Europe’s centre-left parties and some Greens have begun to ‘accept’ that nuclear energy is a clean environmentally friendly way to go. All of a sudden, nuclear power is all zippetty-dip sparkly efficient and really it saves trees, yes it does.
Oops, I farted.
Here comes a meltdown.
