Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Sunday, December 27, 2015
Saturday, December 19, 2015
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Monday, December 14, 2015
MSNBC nutjob Mellissa Harris-Perry says Darth Vader is racist.
I first saw the first Star Wars movie at Graumann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood 3 days after it came out. I have dozens of Star Wars books on my bookshelves.
Never in my wildest thoughts would I ever assume that because Vader wears all black that the character or the people who portrayed him or voiced the character were racist.
This is a case of yet another person who perceives racism in everything where none exists and she's nuts. - TGFP.
Never in my wildest thoughts would I ever assume that because Vader wears all black that the character or the people who portrayed him or voiced the character were racist.
This is a case of yet another person who perceives racism in everything where none exists and she's nuts. - TGFP.
From the Rush Limbaugh website today :
RUSH: And you have nut jobs like Melissa Harris-Perry or whatever her name is on MSNBC. You know, she's a professor at Wake Forest, and do you know her latest tirade? Get this. Darth Vader is racist because he's all black! The character wears black -- black helmet, black cape, black boots -- and it's a subtle message that black people are evil, mean, murdering killers.
She's dead serious about it, folks, and she's on a tirade.
She's on MSNBC talking about it. But worse than that, she's a professor at Wake Forest. She "went into a mini-rant about racism in Star Wars as she complained about villain Darth Vader being 'totally a black guy' when he was 'cutting off white men's hands' who did not 'claim his son,' but then became a white man after he 'claims his son and goes over to the good.'" This is sick. This is literally mentally unstable sick. This woman's a college professorette. She has a TV show. She's talking about a freaking cartoon, a movie, Star Wars.
(interruption) Darth Vader starts out as menacing; he's went over to the dark side, of course, of the force. He's a... (interruption) "Well, but he started out as a white guy." That's right. He's a white guy and gets corrupted. What does that mean? He goes black, all black, and when he's all black he's a murderous, deadly, heartless, cold mean-spirited thug who even tries to wipe out his own son. But at the end of one of the movies, Darth Vader sees the light the black helmet comes off and we find out he's a white guy underneath all the black, says Melissa Harris-Perry.
And that means he becomes white when he wants to become a good guy again and reclaim his son, and this is an example of racism in popular culture, she says. This is insanity! This is the kind of thing that ought to get her fired, this is so irresponsible. (interruption) Damn straight, it should. Why are you looking at me that way? I know she's got tenure; can't be fired. This principal at this public school in New York? This is not just the War on Christmas. There is a war on America being engaged in by the American left.
It's not new.
It's just ramping up here.
From Hot Air today :
From Hot Air today :
Melissa Harris-Perry: Star Wars is racist because Darth Vader was voiced by a black guy who turned good and white.
POSTED AT 4:01 PM ON DECEMBER 14, 2015 BY TAYLOR MILLARD
MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry is has pretty strong feelings about Star Wars, and not all of them are good. She thinks George Lucas’ triology is racist because of who voiced Darth Vader. Seriously…(via Digitas Daily)
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It’s completely possible Harris-Perry was joking here, but probably not. This is the same Harris-Perry who had a panel mock a picture of Mitt Romney and his grandchildren, before later apologizing. Her comments just show a lack of knowledge about the Star Wars subject matter. Here’s a fact about Star Wars: David Prowse, the white actor who played Darth Vader, was never supposed to actually voice Darth Vader. From the documentary Empire of Dreams.
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There’s also a wide-circulated rumor amongst Star Wars fans that Prowse had no idea he was actually going to be dubbed over by James Earl Jones. In fact, Prowse’s face is never seen in the triology either. Lucas hired Sebastian Shaw to be the “face” of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. So, if anything, Prowse got the shaft, not Jones or Shaw (except in the BluRay relese of ROTJ, but that’s a different story).
I honestly don’t expect people to do their research before popping off on a subject, especially Star Wars. That stuff has been relegated to people who have entire bookshelves full of stories about Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Leia Organa-Solo, Lando Calrissian, Ulic Quel-Droma, Kyle Katarn, Boba Fett, and Grand Admiral Thrawn. They can even talk about the difference between the X-wing, Y-wing, and B-wing; and and why TIE Defenders are awesomely clumsy and TIE bombers are slow as all get out. There are entire websites devoted to the Star Wars universe, including some which have created their own world out of what George Lucas originally envisioned. Star Wars may be a cultural phenomena, but not everyone is going to be completely swept away by it. There are plenty of people out there who just “like Star Wars” without being “in love” or obsessed with it. The same thing can be said about cars, sports, comic books, Game of Thrones, politics, music etc.
But it’s important to note it’s not just Harris-Perry who has spouted off about a subject without doing her research. There was a widely circulated rumor in 2011 that Ultimate Spider-Man, Miles Morales, would end up being bisexual. It has to do with a widely misinterpreted comment by Italian artist Sara Pichelli to USA Today.
“Maybe sooner or later a black or gay — or both — hero will be considered something absolutely normal.”
Morales’ sexuality never came up in his Ultimate Spider-Man book, but that hasn’t stopped a variety of websites from running with Pichelli’s quote, without looking at context. It’s unfortunate when something like this happens, but isn’t surprising because we’re human. We like rushing to judgment on quotes without looking at the context and why they were being said. It’s why “gotcha questions” have become such a thing, and politicians are so apt to point out when they’re misquoted. There’s a reason why “context is everything” is a thing among those who want detailed discussion.
This is why I’m always hesitant to rush off into the outrage machine, when something controversial is said. It’s more important to look at the surrounding quotes or question, to see what was actually being said, and how the person was responding to it. This isn’t really a shot at the “listen and react” crowd, because there are a lot of times when what’s being said is actually what’s being said. But it’s also a call to be cautious on certain controversial quotes. It’s a bit maddening, but sometimes it’s worth sitting back and looking at what’s actually being said before immediately reacting to it. It certainly does a better job and keeping people from looking horrible moronic and misinformed, like Harris-Perry does with her “Darth Vader was racist because he was black before he was white.” Sometimes, a voiceover is just a voiceover. With respect to David Prowse, I’d rather have James Earl Jones voice Vader than anyone else because it’s more menacing and just awesome to hear. That’s all Lucas, who isn’t exactly a conservative, was doing. Suggesting otherwise is just ridiculous and shows a lack of knowledge on the subject.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
Friday, December 11, 2015
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Friday, December 4, 2015
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Monday, November 30, 2015
Friday, November 27, 2015
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Monday, November 23, 2015
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Friday, November 20, 2015
Monday, November 16, 2015
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Monday, November 9, 2015
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Friday, November 6, 2015
Monday, November 2, 2015
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Monday, October 26, 2015
Friday, October 23, 2015
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Friday, October 16, 2015
Thursday, October 15, 2015
First snows to come to the Great Lakes, Northeast and Canada this weekend.
By ALEX SOSNOWSKI, AccuWeather.com
Progressively colder air will lead to the first snowflakes and snowfall of the season, as well as the first freeze in parts of the Great Lakes, Northeast and neighboring Canada this weekend.
A cold blast, frost and snowflakes are not all that unusual for this time of the year. However, following warm weather during the past six weeks, some people spending time outdoors will be shivering this weekend. The frost can damage plants that are still thriving due to the recent warmth.
This is not the type of setup to bring feet or even inches of snow to the snow belts to the lee of the Great Lakes but rather a rain/snow mix.
The rain and snow showers could be accompanied by thunder and lightning. Waterspouts are possible from lower Lake Michigan to lakes Erie and Ontario.
A snowstorm is not coming to areas where most people live.
According to AccuWeather Meteorologist Steve Travis, "Accumulating snow will not occur in areas close to the lakes or at elevations below 1,000 feet."
Most of the slushy accumulation will be on non-paved surfaces.
Rain showers will accompany the next push of chilly air as it spreads from parts of the Great Lakes to the Northeast Thursday night into Friday. The coldest locations of the upper Great Lakes, New York state and northern New England could have a few snowflakes mixing in at this time.
As a reinforcing surge of colder air presses southeastward Friday night into Saturday night, cold rain, a mix of rain and snow and wet snow showers are likely to spread from the Great Lakes to the interior Northeast. This will be the most likely time for snowflakes to make it to hilly areas of northeastern Ohio, the mountains of western and northern Pennsylvania, lower elevations of upstate New York and central and northern New England.
"People in areas across the ski country of New York, central New York and northwestern Pennsylvania could wake up to a coating of snow Sunday morning," Travis said.
In portions of northern Maine, New Brunswick and the eastern townships of Quebec, the potential exists for a few inches of snow in some locations from Saturday night into Sunday.
"For example, in Buffalo, New York, the average date for the first snowflakes is Oct. 24 and the earliest some sort of frozen precipitation has fallen was on Sept. 20," Travis said.
Parts of northern New England have already received their first flakes of the season.
In addition to chilly rain showers and snow for some, the main impact will be for the chilliest air of the season so far and for the first frost and freeze of the season to dip southward into parts of the Ohio Valley to the suburbs of the major Interstate-95 cities from Virginia to Maine.
In areas from the Midwest to the Northeast, there can be a frost or freeze both Saturday night and Sunday night. In the Midwest, Saturday night may be the colder of the two nights. In the Northeast, Sunday night will be the colder night.
For places that have had a frost or freeze in the past by the middle of October, take precautions to protect vulnerable plants, harvest vegetables that are ripe, empty bird baths and drain water out of garden hoses.
During the showers of rain and snow, as well as cloudy intervals during the day, actual temperatures can plummet 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit.
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Homemade acid bomb found on Northern California golf course. Bomb maker Kevin Hornbuckle arrested.
ROHNERT PARK, Calif. (AP) — Police say a 49-year-old man has been arrested after a homemade bomb was found on the 18th fairway of a Northern California golf course.
Rohnert Park police Sgt. Jason Krauss says the "acid bomb" capable of spraying debris across a radius of about 50 feet was found at Foxtail Golf Club.
He said maintenance workers found the device — made with a large water bottle — along with a second one that had already detonated nearby.
Krauss tells the San Francisco Chronicle (http://bit.ly/1LGT2e1 ) that a bomb squad moved the explosive device to the course's driving range and detonated it.
The golf course and club house were evacuated, and no one was injured.
Krauss says Kevin Hornbuckle of Rohnert Park was arrested on suspicion of possession and manufacture of a destructive device.
Off duty Memphis, TN. cop Terence Olridge killed on the way to work while sitting in his car ! The war on cops continues.
A Memphis police officer was shot and killed earlier today, reportedly while sitting inside his car.
An off-duty Memphis police officer was shot multiple times and killed Sunday afternoon, FOX13 reported.
Police Director Toney Armstrong ( picture below - TGFP. ) identified the officer as Terence Olridge, 31, during a news conference. Olridge was taken to Regional Medical Center in critical condition but later died from his injuries. The shooting occurred in Cordova, a major retail center just east of Memphis.
A suspect is in custody and the investigation is ongoing.
Olridge was shot near his house after he left to go to work, his uncle told FOX13. His fiance, who is four months pregnant with the couple's first child, was inside the home at the time of the shooting.
 |
| Officer Olridge made it back home & literally crawled into his garage. - TGFP. |
Family members of Memphis Police Officer Terence Olridge wait for news of his condition outside the Regional Medical Center after he was rushed to surgery Sunday afternoon. Olridge later died from multiple gun shot wounds, officials said.
"We just got a call, told us he'd been shot on his way to work, that he made his way back to the door some kind of way," Jerry Kelly, Olridge's uncle, said. "I don't know exactly how he made it back, but made it back to the garage door."
Olridge had only been with the Memphis Police Dept. since September 2014, when he started as a basic recruit. A smiling Olridge was interviewed in February by FOX13 when he graduated to the police force.
"Got a task ahead of me and I am prepared," he said.
Oldridge is the fourth Memphis officer to be fatally shot in slightly more than four years. His death comes only two months after Officer Sean Bolton was fatally shot. Cops believe an ex-convict shot Bolton as the officer interrupted a drug deal. A suspect in that case, Tremaine Wilbourn, has been charged with first-degree murder.
"It's sad, sad it keeps on happening in Memphis," Kelly told FOX13. "Just another life gets taken, someone's life gets taken another day. It's sad."
MRSA infection may mean NY Giants player Daniel Fells may lose his foot and possibly his life as well.
Doctors are fighting to save an NFL player’s foot – and possibly his life – according to an NFL Network report.
Giants tight end Daniel Fells has reportedly had multiple surgeries and was placed in the Intensive Care Unit on Friday for a stubborn Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infection in his ankle. Doctors are worried the infection may have spread into Fells’ bone and could travel into his blood, which could have fatal implications, according to NFL Network.
“This is a serious situation that has been taken seriously from the beginning,” Giants spokesman Pat Hanlon said. “We’re all fighting for Daniel.”
The infection occurred after Fells, 32, injured his toe and then his ankle. He was given a cortisone shot and, following persistent ankle and foot pain, Fells was admitted to the hospital on Oct. 2 with a 104-degree fever. It was later determined his ankle was infected with MRSA. MRSA is a staph infection that has become resistant to most antibiotics that would typically be used to treat it.
Fells has been placed on Injured Reserve and his playing career is in jeopardy. A seven-year veteran, he has played with the St. Louis Rams, Denver Broncos, New England Patriots and Giants. In 89 games, Fells has caught 114 passes for 1,334 yards and 12 touchdowns.
The Giants have sanitized their facilities as a precaution and briefed their players and staff on how to prevent the spread of MRSA.
Obama bans pork from Federal prisons.
Too bad he can't ban pork projects from Congress.
More decisions on what people get to eat from a guy who says he's NOT a Muslim. - TGFP.
Obama bans pork.
CAIR applauds decision.
The federal Bureau of Prisons has banned pork products from being served in the 122 prisons it runs nationwide, The Washington Post reports.
The ban started with the new fiscal year, which began October 1, and is attributed by the bureau to prisoners not liking pork. Surveys over recent years have found prisoners like pork least of all meats, and it is too costly, prison bureau spokesman Edmond Ross told the Post.
The National Pork Producers Council was skeptical.
"I find it hard to believe that a survey would have found a majority of any population saying, 'No thanks, I don’t want any bacon,'" Dave Warner, a spokesman for the group, said.
More decisions on what people get to eat from a guy who says he's NOT a Muslim. - TGFP.
Obama bans pork.
CAIR applauds decision.
The federal Bureau of Prisons has banned pork products from being served in the 122 prisons it runs nationwide, The Washington Post reports.
The ban started with the new fiscal year, which began October 1, and is attributed by the bureau to prisoners not liking pork. Surveys over recent years have found prisoners like pork least of all meats, and it is too costly, prison bureau spokesman Edmond Ross told the Post.
The National Pork Producers Council was skeptical.
"I find it hard to believe that a survey would have found a majority of any population saying, 'No thanks, I don’t want any bacon,'" Dave Warner, a spokesman for the group, said.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations praised the move.
"In general we welcome the change because it’s facilitating the accommodation of Muslim inmates," CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said. "We hope it's not an indication of an increasing number of Muslims in the prison system."
Non-pork options have long been available to observant Jews and Muslims, who can't eat pork products for religious reasons. The nation's 206,000 federal prisoners still can buy packaged pork rinds and pre-cooked bacon in the prison commissary.
"In general we welcome the change because it’s facilitating the accommodation of Muslim inmates," CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said. "We hope it's not an indication of an increasing number of Muslims in the prison system."
Non-pork options have long been available to observant Jews and Muslims, who can't eat pork products for religious reasons. The nation's 206,000 federal prisoners still can buy packaged pork rinds and pre-cooked bacon in the prison commissary.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Friday, October 9, 2015
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Monday, October 5, 2015
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Friday, October 2, 2015
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Sunday, September 27, 2015
The REALLY * BIG * ONE. Not in California, but in Seattle or the Northwest.
July 20, 2015 Issue
The Really Big One
An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.
By Kathryn Schulz
When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.
Seismologists
know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its
magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed
sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage,
lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second
earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long
quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights,
and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an
earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0.
It
was March. There was a chill in the air, and snow flurries, but no snow
on the ground. Nor, from the feel of it, was there ground on the
ground. The earth snapped and popped and rippled. It was, Goldfinger
thought, like driving through rocky terrain in a vehicle with no shocks,
if both the vehicle and the terrain were also on a raft in high seas.
The quake passed the two-minute mark. The trees, still hung with the
previous autumn’s dead leaves, were making a strange rattling sound. The
flagpole atop the building he and his colleagues had just vacated was
whipping through an arc of forty degrees. The building itself was
base-isolated, a seismic-safety technology in which the body of a
structure rests on movable bearings rather than directly on its
foundation. Goldfinger lurched over to take a look. The base was
lurching, too, back and forth a foot at a time, digging a trench in the
yard. He thought better of it, and lurched away. His watch swept past
the three-minute mark and kept going.
Oh,
shit, Goldfinger thought, although not in dread, at first: in
amazement. For decades, seismologists had believed that Japan could not
experience an earthquake stronger than magnitude 8.4. In 2005, however,
at a conference in Hokudan, a Japanese geologist named Yasutaka Ikeda
had argued that the nation should expect a magnitude 9.0 in the near
future—with catastrophic consequences, because Japan’s famous
earthquake-and-tsunami preparedness, including the height of its sea
walls, was based on incorrect science. The presentation was met with
polite applause and thereafter largely ignored. Now, Goldfinger realized
as the shaking hit the four-minute mark, the planet was proving the
Japanese Cassandra right.
For
a moment, that was pretty cool: a real-time revolution in earthquake
science. Almost immediately, though, it became extremely uncool, because
Goldfinger and every other seismologist standing outside in Kashiwa
knew what was coming. One of them pulled out a cell phone and started
streaming videos from the Japanese broadcasting station NHK, shot by
helicopters that had flown out to sea soon after the shaking started.
Thirty minutes after Goldfinger first stepped outside, he watched the
tsunami roll in, in real time, on a two-inch screen.
In
the end, the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami
killed more than eighteen thousand people, devastated northeast Japan,
triggered the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, and cost an
estimated two hundred and twenty billion dollars. The shaking earlier in
the week turned out to be the foreshocks of the largest earthquake in
the nation’s recorded history. But for Chris Goldfinger, a
paleoseismologist at Oregon State University and one of the world’s
leading experts on a little-known fault line, the main quake was itself a
kind of foreshock: a preview of another earthquake still to come.
Most
people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San
Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually
rumored to be on the verge of unleashing “the big one.” That rumor is
misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does. Every fault line
has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width,
and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most
extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that
upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the
Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011
event in Japan.
Take your
hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right
hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its
back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade
Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an
oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size.
The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide
your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate
is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it,
your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up
your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck,
wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.
Flick your right fingers
outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When
the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent,
from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades,
will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to
the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it
has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath
the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your
fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward
into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west,
toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile
liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen
minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased
and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth
Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division
responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our
operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be
toast.”
In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover*
some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle,
Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia
(the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the
next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst
natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand
people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand
died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy.
FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will
die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven
thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to
provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for
another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all
the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,”
Murphy says.
In
May of 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, together with their
Corps of Discovery, set off from St. Louis on America’s first official
cross-country expedition. Eighteen months later, they reached the
Pacific Ocean and made camp near the present-day town of Astoria,
Oregon. The United States was, at the time, twenty-nine years old.
Canada was not yet a country. The continent’s far expanses were so
unknown to its white explorers that Thomas Jefferson, who commissioned
the journey, thought that the men would come across woolly mammoths.
Native Americans had lived in the Northwest for millennia, but they had
no written language, and the many things to which the arriving Europeans
subjected them did not include seismological inquiries. The newcomers
took the land they encountered at face value, and at face value it was a
find: vast, cheap, temperate, fertile, and, to all appearances,
remarkably benign.
A
century and a half elapsed before anyone had any inkling that the
Pacific Northwest was not a quiet place but a place in a long period of
quiet. It took another fifty years to uncover and interpret the region’s
seismic history. Geology, as even geologists will tell you, is not
normally the sexiest of disciplines; it hunkers down with earthly stuff
while the glory accrues to the human and the cosmic—to genetics,
neuroscience, physics. But, sooner or later, every field has its field
day, and the discovery of the Cascadia subduction zone stands as one of
the greatest scientific detective stories of our time.
The Pacific
Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an
oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade
volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is
heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia
subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, “all the right anatomical
parts.” Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a major
earthquake—or, for that matter, any quake to speak of. By contrast,
other subduction zones produce major earthquakes occasionally and minor
ones all the time: magnitude 5.0, magnitude 4.0, magnitude why are the
neighbors moving their sofa at midnight. You can scarcely spend a week
in Japan without feeling this sort of earthquake. You can spend a
lifetime in many parts of the Northwest—several, in fact, if you had
them to spend—and not feel so much as a quiver. The question facing
geologists in the nineteen-seventies was whether the Cascadia subduction
zone had ever broken its eerie silence.
In
the late nineteen-eighties, Brian Atwater, a geologist with the United
States Geological Survey, and a graduate student named David Yamaguchi
found the answer, and another major clue in the Cascadia puzzle. Their
discovery is best illustrated in a place called the ghost forest, a
grove of western red cedars on the banks of the Copalis River, near the
Washington coast. When I paddled out to it last summer, with Atwater and
Yamaguchi, it was easy to see how it got its name. The cedars are
spread out across a low salt marsh on a wide northern bend in the river,
long dead but still standing. Leafless, branchless, barkless, they are
reduced to their trunks and worn to a smooth silver-gray, as if they had
always carried their own tombstones inside them.
What
killed the trees in the ghost forest was saltwater. It had long been
assumed that they died slowly, as the sea level around them gradually
rose and submerged their roots. But, by 1987, Atwater, who had found in
soil layers evidence of sudden land subsidence along the Washington
coast, suspected that that was backward—that the trees had died quickly
when the ground beneath them plummeted. To find out, he teamed up with
Yamaguchi, a specialist in dendrochronology, the study of growth-ring
patterns in trees. Yamaguchi took samples of the cedars and found that
they had died simultaneously: in tree after tree, the final rings dated
to the summer of 1699. Since trees do not grow in the winter, he and
Atwater concluded that sometime between August of 1699 and May of 1700
an earthquake had caused the land to drop and killed the cedars. That
time frame predated by more than a hundred years the written history of
the Pacific Northwest—and so, by rights, the detective story should have
ended there.
But
it did not. If you travel five thousand miles due west from the ghost
forest, you reach the northeast coast of Japan. As the events of 2011
made clear, that coast is vulnerable to tsunamis, and the Japanese have
kept track of them since at least 599 A.D. In that fourteen-hundred-year
history, one incident has long stood out for its strangeness. On the
eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of the Genroku era, a
six-hundred-mile-long wave struck the coast, levelling homes, breaching
a castle moat, and causing an accident at sea. The Japanese understood
that tsunamis were the result of earthquakes, yet no one felt the ground
shake before the Genroku event. The wave had no discernible origin.
When scientists began studying it, they called it an orphan tsunami.
Finally, in a 1996 article in Nature,
a seismologist named Kenji Satake and three colleagues, drawing on the
work of Atwater and Yamaguchi, matched that orphan to its parent—and
thereby filled in the blanks in the Cascadia story with uncanny
specificity. At approximately nine o’ clock at night on January 26,
1700, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing
sudden land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean,
lifting up a wave half the length of a continent. It took roughly
fifteen minutes for the Eastern half of that wave to strike the
Northwest coast. It took ten hours for the other half to cross the
ocean. It reached Japan on January 27, 1700: by the local calendar, the
eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of Genroku.
Once
scientists had reconstructed the 1700 earthquake, certain previously
overlooked accounts also came to seem like clues. In 1964, Chief Louis
Nookmis, of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, in British Columbia, told a
story, passed down through seven generations, about the eradication of
Vancouver Island’s Pachena Bay people. “I think it was at nighttime that
the land shook,” Nookmis recalled. According to another tribal history,
“They sank at once, were all drowned; not one survived.” A hundred
years earlier, Billy Balch, a leader of the Makah tribe, recounted a
similar story. Before his own time, he said, all the water had receded
from Washington State’s Neah Bay, then suddenly poured back in,
inundating the entire region. Those who survived later found canoes
hanging from the trees. In a 2005 study, Ruth Ludwin, then a
seismologist at the University of Washington, together with nine
colleagues, collected and analyzed Native American reports of
earthquakes and saltwater floods. Some of those reports contained enough
information to estimate a date range for the events they described. On
average, the midpoint of that range was 1701.
Goldfinger
told me this in his lab at Oregon State, a low prefab building that a
passing English major might reasonably mistake for the maintenance
department. Inside the lab is a walk-in freezer. Inside the freezer are
floor-to-ceiling racks filled with cryptically labelled tubes, four
inches in diameter and five feet long. Each tube contains a core sample
of the seafloor. Each sample contains the history, written in
seafloorese, of the past ten thousand years. During subduction-zone
earthquakes, torrents of land rush off the continental slope, leaving a
permanent deposit on the bottom of the ocean. By counting the number and
the size of deposits in each sample, then comparing their extent and
consistency along the length of the Cascadia subduction zone, Goldfinger
and his colleagues were able to determine how much of the zone has
ruptured, how often, and how drastically.
Thanks
to that work, we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced
forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If
you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and
forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount
of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous
both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an
entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and
because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we
are now three hundred and fifteen years into a
two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.
It
is possible to quibble with that number. Recurrence intervals are
averages, and averages are tricky: ten is the average of nine and
eleven, but also of eighteen and two. It is not possible, however, to
dispute the scale of the problem. The devastation in Japan in 2011 was
the result of a discrepancy between what the best science predicted and
what the region was prepared to withstand. The same will hold true in
the Pacific Northwest—but here the discrepancy is enormous. “The science
part is fun,” Goldfinger says. “And I love doing it. But the gap
between what we know and what we should do about it is getting bigger
and bigger, and the action really needs to turn to responding.
Otherwise, we’re going to be hammered. I’ve been through one of these
massive earthquakes in the most seismically prepared nation on earth. If
that was Portland”—Goldfinger finished the sentence with a shake of his
head before he finished it with words. “Let’s just say I would rather
not be here.”
The
first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a
compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional
waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and
certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt.
They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since
they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors thirty to ninety
seconds ahead of other seismic waves. That is enough time for earthquake
early-warning systems, such as those in use throughout Japan, to
automatically perform a variety of lifesaving functions: shutting down
railways and power plants, opening elevators and firehouse doors,
alerting hospitals to halt surgeries, and triggering alarms so that the
general public can take cover. The Pacific Northwest has no
early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will
be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended,
what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive. Surface waves are
slower, lower-frequency waves that move the ground both up and down and
side to side: the shaking, starting in earnest.
Soon
after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely
everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens
at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory,
those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and
relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But,
lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most
people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will
shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors
and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down:
bookshelves, lamps, computers, cannisters of flour in the pantry.
Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and
toppling over. Water heaters will fall and smash interior gas lines.
Houses that are not bolted to their foundations will slide off—or,
rather, they will stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations,
together with the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoored on the
undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.
Across
the region, other, larger structures will also start to fail. Until
1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in the
Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake
until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were
constructed before then. Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of
Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), estimates that seventy-five per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. FEMA
calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million
buildings—more than three thousand of them schools—will collapse or be
compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges,
fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and
two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire
stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals.
Among
natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being completely
unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be there when
it happens: to steer clear of the vulnerable area in the first place,
or get yourself to high ground as fast as possible. For the seventy-one
thousand people who live in Cascadia’s inundation zone, that will mean
evacuating in the narrow window after one disaster ends and before
another begins. They will be notified to do so only by the earthquake
itself—“a vibrate-alert system,” Kevin Cupples, the city planner for the
town of Seaside, Oregon, jokes—and they are urged to leave on foot,
since the earthquake will render roads impassable. Depending on
location, they will have between ten and thirty minutes to get out. That
time line does not allow for finding a flashlight, tending to an
earthquake injury, hesitating amid the ruins of a home, searching for
loved ones, or being a Good Samaritan. “When that tsunami is coming, you
run,” Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy
Advisory Commission (OSSPAC), says. “You protect yourself, you don’t turn around, you don’t go back to save anybody. You run for your life.”
These lax safety
policies guarantee that many people inside the inundation zone will not
get out. Twenty-two per cent of Oregon’s coastal population is
sixty-five or older. Twenty-nine per cent of the state’s population is
disabled, and that figure rises in many coastal counties. “We can’t save
them,” Kevin Cupples says. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say, ‘Oh,
yeah, we’ll go around and check on the elderly.’ No. We won’t.” Nor
will anyone save the tourists. Washington State Park properties within
the inundation zone see an average of seventeen thousand and twenty-nine
guests a day. Madin estimates that up to a hundred and fifty thousand
people visit Oregon’s beaches on summer weekends. “Most of them won’t
have a clue as to how to evacuate,” he says. “And the beaches are the
hardest place to evacuate from.”
Those
who cannot get out of the inundation zone under their own power will
quickly be overtaken by a greater one. A grown man is knocked over by
ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving
more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with
the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet.
It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface
of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean,
elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water—not once it
reaches the shore. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and
doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and
everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific
Northwest.
To
see the full scale of the devastation when that tsunami recedes, you
would need to be in the international space station. The inundation zone
will be scoured of structures from California to Canada. The earthquake
will have wrought its worst havoc west of the Cascades but caused
damage as far away as Sacramento, California—as distant from the
worst-hit areas as Fort Wayne, Indiana, is from New York. FEMA expects
to coördinate search-and-rescue operations across a hundred thousand
square miles and in the waters off four hundred and fifty-three miles of
coastline. As for casualties: the figures I cited earlier—twenty-seven
thousand injured, almost thirteen thousand dead—are based on the
agency’s official planning scenario, which has the earthquake striking
at 9:41 A.M. on February 6th. If, instead, it strikes in
the summer, when the beaches are full, those numbers could be off by a
horrifying margin.
How much all this will cost is anyone’s guess; FEMA
puts every number on its relief-and-recovery plan except a price. But
whatever the ultimate figure—and even though U.S. taxpayers will cover
seventy-five to a hundred per cent of the damage, as happens in declared
disasters—the economy of the Pacific Northwest will collapse. Crippled
by a lack of basic services, businesses will fail or move away. Many
residents will flee as well. OSSPAC predicts a
mass-displacement event and a long-term population downturn. Chris
Goldfinger didn’t want to be there when it happened. But, by many
metrics, it will be as bad or worse to be there afterward.
On
the face of it, earthquakes seem to present us with problems of space:
the way we live along fault lines, in brick buildings, in homes made
valuable by their proximity to the sea. But, covertly, they also present
us with problems of time. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we
are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average individual
allotment of three score years and ten. The brevity of our lives breeds a
kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to
those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.
This
problem is bidirectional. The Cascadia subduction zone remained hidden
from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past.
It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough
about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now
understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do. Nor
is it a problem of imagination. If you are so inclined, you can watch an
earthquake destroy much of the West Coast this summer in Brad Peyton’s
“San Andreas,” while, in neighboring theatres, the world threatens to
succumb to Armageddon by other means: viruses, robots, resource
scarcity, zombies, aliens, plague. As those movies attest, we excel at
imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic
visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a
plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a
way that helps to avert them.
The
last person I met with in the Pacific Northwest was Doug Dougherty, the
superintendent of schools for Seaside, which lies almost entirely
within the tsunami-inundation zone. Of the four schools that Dougherty
oversees, with a total student population of sixteen hundred, one is
relatively safe. The others sit five to fifteen feet above sea level.
When the tsunami comes, they will be as much as forty-five feet below
it.
In 2009, Dougherty told me, he
found some land for sale outside the inundation zone, and proposed
building a new K-12 campus there. Four years later, to foot the
hundred-and-twenty-eight-million-dollar bill, the district put up a bond
measure. The tax increase for residents amounted to two dollars and
sixteen cents per thousand dollars of property value. The measure failed
by sixty-two per cent. Dougherty tried seeking help from Oregon’s
congressional delegation but came up empty. The state makes money
available for seismic upgrades, but buildings within the inundation zone
cannot apply. At present, all Dougherty can do is make sure that his
students know how to evacuate.
Some
of them, however, will not be able to do so. At an elementary school in
the community of Gearhart, the children will be trapped. “They can’t
make it out from that school,” Dougherty said. “They have no place to
go.” On one side lies the ocean; on the other, a wide, roadless bog.
When the tsunami comes, the only place to go in Gearhart is a small
ridge just behind the school. At its tallest, it is forty-five feet
high—lower than the expected wave in a full-margin earthquake. For now,
the route to the ridge is marked by signs that say “Temporary Tsunami
Assembly Area.” I asked Dougherty about the state’s long-range plan.
“There is no long-range plan,” he said.
Dougherty’s
office is deep inside the inundation zone, a few blocks from the beach.
All day long, just out of sight, the ocean rises up and collapses,
spilling foamy overlapping ovals onto the shore. Eighty miles farther
out, ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea, the hand of a
geological clock is somewhere in its slow sweep. All across the region,
seismologists are looking at their watches, wondering how long we have,
and what we will do, before geological time catches up to our own. ♦
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