Radioactivity

I have been away this week, hence the shortage of posts. But I have been following the news and one thing is really bothering me.

Would everyone please shut up about the radioactivity?

Is everyone that wildly self-centered? I mean, the disaster in Japan should bring a massive humanitarian response. Instead, the western media, at least the US media, can't get enough of a single nuclear power plant which posed essentially no threat to anyone not in the immediate vicinity. Really, even if it had "blown" you would have been talking about a contained radiation leak and steam explosion which would have given some people about as much radiation as an x-ray, and 1,000 times less than getting a CT scan.

Now, the latests news is that people are worried about food. In wild and captivating news (#3 on wsj.com right now) is that radioactivity has been found in milk and cabbage in Japan. The truly scary part? The cabbage is 5 times more radioactive than normal!! Ahhh!!! RUN AWAY!!!

Wait... cabbage is normally not radioactive.... so yeah, turns out that these giant mutant glowing green cabbages are about 1/100th as radioactive as a cubic meter of soil from the surface of the earth. The horror.

Please, the disaster is the loss of life and the destruction of so much of Japan. Shut the hell up about the nuclear reactor. The only disaster there is the rekindling of the irrational fears people have about nuclear power in the first place.