Much of interest in today's politics

What happened in Japan is certainly tragic, and a reminder of how fragile things are. Should there be another even stronger rupture in the seaboard the whole of Japan could literally be washed away, and for one thing this would certainly bring about earthquakes in the world economy too. More than 120 million live on those small islands, and the potential catastrophe could not even be blamed on any enviroment misuse. However, the nuclear threat is another matter all together, and very troublesome indeed. Nuclear power may well be clean, cheap and efficient, but if something goes wrong the effects would outdo the oil and gas troubles by far.Japan knows all about that, tragically.
But Japan needs the energy, and even more so if it can't get a stable supply from the middle-east.

Listening to Jan Egeland give his evaluation of the situation was interesting, and I noticed something interesting; he spoke about all the search and rescue teams around the world, waiting to be dispatched and rush into the disaster area. And he was asked about this, why wouldn't Japan just accept this with open arms. And his answer was that firstly a high level of organization needs to be in place. And secondly, Japan is one of the world's richest and best organized countries, and people there would certainly be able to muster a lot of resources on their own, and they would have to ask if they needed aid. But there is more; because the service of the search and rescue-teams is not free; it is rather expensive, and lack of coordination could even make things worse, rather than help.

I'm sure many religious groups are now predicting the end of the world as can be read in for example the book of Revelation in the Bible. It is ironic to think about aid worker's groups actually making it an industry to provide relief, and as such profiting on the "last times". I'm also sure there is a lot of healthy idealism in many of these groups, and even human compassion and empathy,but I see it as a good thing that the country's government has to ask for these services themselves, and even decide when to dismiss the rescue-groups.


The winds of change in the middle east are also very exciting to follow; the western countries' human rights hipocracy was clearly undressed, but this process is also fragile; the fall of the Saudi-Arabian ruling family is a terror scenario that the western countries don't even dare to think about.