Incoming! (sort of)

Say, is that an arrow sticking out of your cyclic control, buddy?

I would like to take this opportunity, kindly provided by the congenital idiots at the British Broadcasting Corporation, to present an object example of what a "quantum leap of illogic" looks like:

"Officials believe they survived the devastation by using age-old early warning systems.

"They might have run to high ground for safety after noticing changes in the behaviour of birds and marine wildlife.

"Scientists are examining the possibility to see whether it can be used to predict earth tremors in future."

I see where they're going with this; I've seen it before, and it gets on my nerves a little more each time it recurs in the press. Let's examine this in detail, shall we?

What We Don't Know: 1) How they survived; 2) How many survived; 3) Whether they may or may not have known about the impending tsunami; 4) How or if they reacted to such supposed "intuitive knowledge."

What We Do Know: 1) Primitive savages are shooting arrows at a helicopter.

So, what can inductive logic tell the "authorities?" That we should ask primitive savages--who can't even figure out how to combine sulfur, charcoal and saltpeter--if they could tell us how to run for higher ground.

Brilliant! I've seldom seen such criminal abuse of the scientific method.

I've about had enough of this "noble savage" garbage. Can we please let it die with its most recently-deceased, and possibly most infamous advocate, Susan Sontag? It was a worthless, bankrupt concept when it was first conjured from the quasi-intellectual ether, and it remains so today.

The fact is, the means was in place to detect the earthquake, and hence predict the resulting tsunami. What was lacking was a properly structured warning system. The failure was not in technology, but rather in the lack of extant and widely available technology to properly issue the warning. The failure, in short, lies with people--namely, the aforementioned "authorities,"--to do their jobs, not in technology or modern civilization.

Naked bumpkins running for the hills do not invalidate 4,000 years of technological progress, nor are thousands of dead shanty-town dwellers an indictment of modern civilization, despite the best efforts of every enviro-freak and psuedo-intellectual this side of Noam Chomsky to make it so.