Japao, depois do 11 de Marco - Guy Sorman

Japan, After March 11
GUY SORMAN
The City Journal, vol. 21. n. 2, Spring 2011

The country, resilient as ever, remains Asia’s true power.

The earthquake that struck Japan’s Sendai region on March 11 was the most violent in the nation’s recorded history. The temblor shook the ground for more than two minutes, tilting the earth’s axis and unleashing an enormous tsunami that drowned thousands in northern Japan and left a path of destruction in its wake. Adding to the calamity, power outages caused cooling pumps to fail at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, risking multiple reactor meltdowns and leading to mass evacuations.

The crisis—described by Prime Minister Naoto Kan as his country’s “worst in the 65 years since the war”—has led some commentators to predict that Japan will never recover. This is an absurd contention, as was already evident in the immediate aftermath of March 11, when the remarkable characteristics of Japanese society shone through. Accustomed to natural disaster, the Japanese people showed little panic even at the peak of the horror. Looting, which one often sees after earthquakes in other societies, was nonexistent. Japan proved itself astonishingly well prepared: the quake itself, it turned out, caused relatively little direct damage to buildings, even in Sendai, thanks to strict construction codes imposed after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which killed 6,000. Perhaps most striking of all was that the Japanese export machine was so little damaged. Production and delivery of many goods, ranging from computer chips to industrial components, were interrupted for only a matter of hours, though shortages have slowed things down sporadically.

But even before the earthquake, pundits often forgot that Japan remains Asia’s leading power and most successful society. True, as the press has trumpeted, the Chinese economy has grown larger than Japan’s and is now the world’s second-largest, after America’s. Yet China has ten times Japan’s population, which means that per-capita wealth in Japan is still ten times greater. And Chinese economic output is low-tech, completely different from the sophisticated products developed and made by Japanese industries. “Ultimately, we’re not in a race,” says Hideki Kato, one of Japan’s leading economists and president of the Tokyo Foundation, a free-market think tank.

Yet Kato doesn’t dismiss China’s challenge. “To have been overcome in 2010, even if those figures don’t mean much, has awakened the Japanese, given them a sense of crisis,” he says. And crises have energized the Japanese in the past, points out Naoki Inose, a vice governor of Tokyo and a respected historian. Indeed, they have provoked what many Japanese call the country’s two great historical “openings.” Will the disaster of March 11 and the rise of China together provoke a third?

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leiam a íntegra neste link: http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_2_japan.html

2046) A divina arte da predicao de terremotos (nao para todos, so os mais devotos...)

Mulheres causam terremotos
Bem, nao é misoginia, apenas um aviso cientifico.
Infelizmente, nem todos os paises podem dispor de uma lideranca politica tao alerta e tao esclarecida, a ponto de prever terremotos.
Acredito que com um pouco mais de esforcos, e com contatos mais frequentes com as autoridades iranianas, as nossas liderancas politicas tambem conseguiriam se aperfeicoar, e ajudar o Brasil nesta dificil tarefa de prever terremotos...
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Paulo Roberto Almeida

Islamismo
Clérigo no Irã diz que mulheres causam terremotos
Opinião e Notícia, 20/04/2010 (The Guardian)

Segundo a crença iraniana, a mulher que se veste sem modéstia transforma o comportamento do homem, corrompendo sua castidade e espalhando o adultério na sociedade — o que causaria terremotos no planeta. De acordo com uma previsão do presidente Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, um terremoto irá atingir o Teerã e boa parte dos mais de 12 milhões de habitantes da cidade deveriam relocar em algum outro lugar. No entanto, ele ainda não tem uma data certa para o acontecimento.

O líder espiritual Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi afirma que as calamidades ameaçam severamente o seu povo e foi aconselhado por uma Autoridade Divina a convocar a todos para um arrependimento geral, como forma de mostrar a Deus sua devoção, e tentar livrar o Teerã do terrível terremoto que só Deus poderia evitar. Ele se refere também ao terremoto político ocorrido na última disputa à presidência, em que o governo iraniano trava uma forte batalha contra o movimento da oposição que acusa Ahmadinejad de vencer as eleições de forma fraudulenta. O ministro Sadeq Mahsooli disse que orações e pedidos de perdão são as melhores formas de repelir os terremotos.

Fontes: Guardian - Women to blame for earthquakes, says Iran cleric

Women to blame for earthquakes, says Iran cleric
The Guardian, Monday 19 April 2010

Women behaving promiscuously are causing the earth to shake, according to cleric, as Ahmadinejad predicts Tehran quake
A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

Iran is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries, and the cleric's unusual explanation for why the earth shakes follows a prediction by the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that a quake is certain to hit Tehran and that many of its 12 million inhabitants should relocate.

"Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes," Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Women in the Islamic Republic are required by law to cover from head to toe, but many, especially the young, ignore some of the more strict codes and wear tight coats and scarves pulled back that show much of the hair. "What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?" Sedighi asked during a prayer sermon last week. "There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam's moral codes." Seismologists have warned for at least two decades that it is likely the sprawling capital will be struck by a catastrophic quake in the near future. Some experts have even suggested Iran should move its capital to a less seismically active location. Tehran straddles scores of fault lines, including one more than 50 miles long, though it has not suffered a major quake since 1830.

In 2003, a powerful earthquake hit the southern city of Bam, killing 31,000 people – about a quarter of that city's population – and destroying its ancient mud-built citadel.

"A divine authority told me to tell the people to make a general repentance. Why? Because calamities threaten us," said Sedighi, Tehran's acting Friday prayer leader. Referring to the violence that followed last June's disputed presidential election, he said: "The political earthquake that occurred was a reaction to some of the actions [that took place]. And now, if a natural earthquake hits Tehran, no one will be able to confront such a calamity but God's power, only God's power ... So let's not disappoint God."

The Iranian government and its security forces have been locked in a bloody battle with a large opposition movement that accuses Ahmadinejad of winning last year's vote by fraud.

Ahmadinejad made his quake prediction two weeks ago but said he could not give an exact date. He acknowledged that he could not order all of Tehran's 12m people to evacuate. "But provisions have to be made ... at least 5 million should leave Tehran so it is less crowded," the president said.

The welfare minister, Sadeq Mahsooli, said prayers and pleas for forgiveness were the best "formulae to repel earthquakes. We cannot invent a system that prevents earthquakes, but God has created this system and that is to avoid sins, to pray, to seek forgiveness, pay alms and self-sacrifice," Mahsooli said.