Caught The China Syndrome, the 1979 nuclear power plant disaster movie, on TV tonight. A character in the movie says that a nuclear meltdown could result in an area the size of Pennsylvania becoming permanently uninhabitable. And the filmmakers clearly had an agenda: to damage the nuclear power industry. Do you know what happened just twelve days after the movie was released? The famous Three Mile Island nuclear power plant disaster. Do you know where Three Mile Island is? Pennsylvania. Do you know what happened after the accident? The movie took off at the box office. And construction of new nuclear power plants effectively ceased.
Coincidence? Put on your thinking caps, people! Don't be sheeple!
Was the Three Mile Island accident engineered by Columbia Pictures (the film’s distributor) and its allies in the anti-nuclear movement so as to generate publicity for the movie? Was the reference to “Pennsylvania” an inadvertent slip by a screenwriter or actor having foreknowledge of the event? In the same year, Columbia Pictures co-produced the Steven Spielberg flop 1941 with Universal Studios. Universal was at the time controlled by mogul Lew Wasserman, well-known as a patron of the Democratic Party. Jimmy Carter, the president at the time and a Democrat, visited the site of the Three Mile Island disaster, thereby lending the power of his office to fostering the perception that the accident was a major one which ought to raise concerns about nuclear power. Carter’s daughter Amy once famously advised her father that the control of nuclear arms was the most pressing issue in the election of 1980 -- one year after the movie and the accident.
Oh, and Spielberg supports Israel.
Again, could this all just be coincidence?
Hey, I’m just asking questions here. Surely more research is needed?
The answer, of course, is yes, it is just a coincidence. And no, no further "research" is needed. Such “eyebrow-raising coincidences” are a dime a dozen, and are utterly meaningless. People overly impressed with Marvin Bush’s “links” to Larry Silverstein or Prescott Bush’s “links” to Hitler take note.
People predisposed to believe that there is a leftist screenwriter lurking under every bed will, of course, no doubt see in this something more than coincidence – just as someone predisposed to look for Zionists or neo-cons under every bed will see all sorts of strange things in other entirely innocent patterns. But the “six degrees of separation” phenomenon has a name because it is real, and what it shows is that there are all sorts of patterns in social affairs that tell us… precisely nothing of interest.
Comments (9)
Is it just me, or does anyone else think 1941 was underrated?
Posted by Jeff Singer | January 29, 2009 6:16 AM
Hopefully a new generation will flush the baby boomers' unfounded fears down the toilet, if necessary, and start building nuke again. Of course that generation might start flushing the boomers themselves, but you could hardly blame them for that. If you don't build the nuke plant on a fault line it's the safest and cheapest energy out there. The rest of the world knows this, and is surely laughing at us.
Posted by Pauli | January 29, 2009 9:20 AM
Hey, I liked 1941!
Posted by Francis Beckwith | January 29, 2009 10:33 AM
I will neither confirm nor deny that I liked 1941. Nor that a friend of mine and I used to quote long stretches of dialogue from it verbatim. Nor that the DVD is in my collection, and has possibly the best set of extras on any DVD I've seen. Nope. Gonna take the Fifth.
Posted by Edward Feser | January 29, 2009 11:40 AM
The next big conspiracy is obviously Rod Blagojevich's hair and the psychosis it has caused. Only an amateur could miss that. :)
Posted by Step2 | January 29, 2009 2:32 PM
Think about it:
If Blagojevich were the Hulk, Paul McCartney (circa 1965) would be Bruce Banner.
Posted by Francis Beckwith | January 29, 2009 4:38 PM
The next big conspiracy is obviously Rod Blagojevich's hair and the psychosis it has caused.
Definitely. I am already starting to think that the Illinois senate impeached him purely out of jealousy of his wonderful, flowing mane.
Posted by Zach | January 29, 2009 7:51 PM
Er... You don't have to believe there are "Zionists or neo-cons under every bed" to know they and their Gentile tools have had a grossly disproportionate influence over our government and media with bloody and staggeringly expensive consequences. And, oh yeah, their primarily loyalty is to Israel and Jews, NOT America. It's grossly insulting to our intelligence to pretend otherwise.
Why have they so passionately promoted America as an Universalist, Proposition nation with massive 3rd world immigration and willful neglect in enforcing our immigration laws, leading to the ultimate displacement of our traditional population and its culture, while insisting on THE OPPOSITE for Israel, so it stays an ethnocentric Jewish nation that only allows Jews to immigrate?
Posted by Anonymous Dude | February 1, 2009 3:45 AM
The State of Pennsylvania was chosen because that was the example given in WASH 1400 - a risk analysis of nuclear accidents by MIT and then adopted by the NRC.
New Nuclear power plant construction had dried up the year before TMI.
The research has been done.
Hollywood, Zionism etc. had nothing to do with your supposition.
Stop being a Sheeple labeler, you are one too! You could have looked it up yourself, but you prefer to follow the lead of many others who only ask questions in a veiled attempt to pass as thoughtful.
Go get em cowboy!
Posted by noaccident | February 12, 2009 12:45 PM