Exploding Cells, Extreme Hubris
Modernity is killing us. In the last few days, we’ve gotten a whole lot of disturbing news that could make a reasonable person think that maybe the whole world is downshifting into the realm of urban mythology.
We were shocked to find out that many of our cell phones are really Improvised Exploding Devices in disguise. While trying to wrap our heads around that, we also heard that sitting down for long periods at work will make us fat, no matter how much we exercise.
The latest cautionary tales about the perils of modern life is from Chungcheong Province, South Korea. A few days ago, a 33-year-old quarry worker in a town south of Seoul died on the job after his cell phone exploded in his breast pocket.
The Korean man’s death was similar to the way a welder in China died last summer. The symptoms were equally horrific: burns to his upper body, broken ribs, hemorrhaging of the lungs and a fractured spine consistent with the effects of a low-level explosion.
According to the BBC News, soot in the shape of a cell phone was found in the South Korean man’s shirt pocket. CNN had impressive before-and-after photos of an undamaged version of the phone and what it looked like after it took the quarry man’s life.
The lithium-ion batteries that power most cell phones are considered prime suspects in both cases, though investigators in China’s Gansu province allow for the possibility that the phone explosion that killed the welder was triggered by the high temperatures at his work site.
Paging Fox Mulder: This is either the raw material of another classic episode of “The X-Files” or the most absurd case of product malpractice in several generations.
Spontaneous human combustion is so medieval that when it occurs, it feels like a sly rebuke of modern technology, especially when the culprit is something as banal as a cell phone battery.
No sooner had we pulled up a chair to digest this news, ABC News informed us that a team of scientists at the University of Missouri have linked the nation’s obesity epidemic to sitting on our butts for eight-hour shifts. The enzymes responsible for burning fat shut down when we sit. We have to stand to burn fat continuously during the day.
The implications are pretty clear: Unless the American workplace becomes an environment where standing is the norm, we’re destined to continue evolving into a nation of potato spuds.
Scientists at the Mayo Clinic have already designed “walkstations” that will enable office employees to burn calories while doing routine office tasks like sending and checking e-mail.
Experts in workplace efficiency have long suggested that office meetings be conducted with everyone standing to cut down on our natural inclination to bloviate and waste time.
The Mayo Clinic walkstations look cool and sleek, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for the Post-Gazette to spring for buying hundreds of these things for the staff. Guess I’ll have to get used to walking around with a yellow legal pad and composing columns on my feet if I really want to rev up my metabolism.
Alas, the shocks didn’t stop at exploding phones and butt expanding workplaces. While clicking around the dial, viewers were surprised to see old Karl Rove on “The Charlie Rose Show” this week insisting that President Bush was “pushed” into invading Iraq by a saber-rattling Democratic Congress in 2002.
According to Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush didn’t really want Congress to approve the Iraq war resolution until he had assembled a coalition that rivaled the one his father put together to drive Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991.
Mr. Bush had an approval rating at the time that could only be called stratospheric. His man Karl Rove is asking us to believe his hands were tied because of the perfidious tyranny of the Democrats’ one-vote majority in Congress. It was the Democrats who “pushed” the then-popular president into galvanizing for a war he wasn’t fully prepared to fight in March 2003. The unwritten story of the Iraq war, according to Mr. Rove, is that the Democrats started it. Mr. Bush’s only desire was to support the troops once the Dems pulled the trigger.
At that point, I began mentally taking inventory of the similarities and differences between the world I know and the one Karl Rove occupies. I blamed myself for the discrepancy in reality. Obviously I had fallen into a parallel universe where the Bush administration was sober and wise and the Democrats weren’t spineless rabble in 2002.
There was so much cognitive dissonance coursing through my brain while watching that Charlie Rose interview that my head exploded. I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. My cell phone was nowhere in sight. I checked.
Tony Norman can be reached at tnorman@post-gazette.com.
Copyright ©1997 - 2007 PG Publishing Co., Inc.
The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.
I will be labeled as an elitist and as an America-hater, but I will state my opinion regardless: Americans are stupid, stupid people who will believe the lies of evil men like Karl Rove. The big surprise is not that the United States is becoming the Third Reich on steroids. The big surprise is that it hasn’t happened sooner.
I suppose old Karl would lie under oath as well. Too bad he got away with outing Valerie Plame, thereby forcing the shutdown of a team trying to keep nuclear weapons out of Iran. But hey, he killed two birds with one stone. It opened the way for Bush to attack Iran for developing nuclear weapons - whether they were or not.
So just how many people have been killed by exploding cell phones?
Commander-in-chimp {quote}: “Americans are stupid, stupid people who will believe the lies of evil men like Karl Rove.”
Agreed. The collective intelligence of the US citizenry has to be at an all-time low. The collective wisdom of the same group barely registers.
Karl Rove is a clever man. My experience with clever people is that they live for the love of the game (whatever their game of choice happens to be). However, in my experience, most will quite the game if winning is too easy. Maybe what they really want is the challenge.
I often wonder if this isn’t why Rove left the White House. He won everything – too simply – and it wasn’t a fun game anymore. Not enough of a challenge for his clever, clever mind. I wonder, now, why he’s chosen this re-writing history game. With the shallow intelligence of the Jon Q Public, he’s going to win this one, too. Hell, he won’t even have to try very hard.
Clever Mr. Rove can find a more challenging game, can’t he?
Uhmm, getting back to the exploding cell phone.
Well, I have been following this tale, and it is just that a tall tale. The damage on the man’s corpse was not consistent with either the placement or the explosive power of a cell phone’s battery.
Still, let the Luddite’s have their day… Again!
Americans are not stupid. The vast majority of Americans want fundamental change in our foreign policy, the war on terror, the economy, the schools, and they know the truth despite the mainstream media being a cheerleader for the government. Our problem is that there are no STATESMEN among our political whores in D.C. The DEMS know clearly what “WE THE PEOPLE” want and they have done absolutely nothing about placing our concerns into the agenda. Americans know their corporations are in bed with their elected officials. They aren’t stupid but they have been marginalized.
Hoa binh
since1492, please explain why a majority of Americans support a war against Iran. Please explain why a majority of people continued to believe that Iraq and Al Qaeda were allies even after Bush, the devil, himself said there wasn’t a connection between the September 11, 2001 attacks and Saddam Hussein. Please explain why a greater percentage of people in the USA believe in the supernatural and believe in creationism as opposed to people in Europe. Please explain why people in the United States were so easily manipulated by the health care industry when the Clintons first tried to implement universal health coverage. Please explain why Americans are convinced that the so-called “surge” in Iraq is “working”. Please explain why Americans, when polled, believe that only 10,000 Iraqis have died in Iraq despite evidence that the blood of one million Iraqis is splattered on American boots. Please explain why Americans are more likely to listen to the opinions of Oprah, Dr. Phil, and Rachel Ray over the opinions of John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, or Naomi Klein.
No, I stand by my original statement. In general, America is dumb as a rock.
Bohica
ps
Bohica
Maybe not so much stupid as brainwashed.
Your original point was that Americans were stupid. I don’t agree that most Americans support a war with Iran and what they don’t know about the Iraq War is thanks to their media. So you can’t say they are stupid for something they didn’t know. I’ll say it again - the vast majority of Americans are fed up with the status quo in D.C. The last election proved that. And most polls also confirm the disgust of Americans when it comes to their own government. The problem isn’t that voice of the majority in America is being drowned and diluted out by media. The problem is that our elected officials refuse to follow the voice of the people. I guess Voice of America only works in foreign countries. Must be part of the globalization process.
Hoa binh
The public be damned. The Decider is in charge here. STFU, sit down, and don’t think that you can influence the Commander in Chief Guy.
TruOrange - I think Rove left the White House to hide in the woods until the furor over Plamegate subsided (again). Rove was a lightning rod for criticism so he went away for awhile.
I said at the time - I’ll believe that Rove is truly gone only when the White House denies it.
If Bush is of average intelligence then half of Americans are stupider.
Ain’t that frightening.
Can we start a recycle program to send all our old cell phone batteries to the White House?
I wanted to note that the man was not killed by an exploding cellphone afterall. According to the Associated Press:
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A death originally thought to have been caused by an exploding cell phone is now being blamed on a co-worker, who confessed to making up the story after accidentally striking the victim with a drilling vehicle, South Korean police said Friday.
The quarry worker, only identified by his family name Seo, was found dead Wednesday with a melted phone battery in his shirt pocket. Police and a local doctor who examined his body said a malfunctioning battery may have killed the man.
However, after preliminary autopsy results suggested damage to Seo’s internal organs was too great to be caused by a cell phone explosion, police questioned the colleague who first reported Seo’s death, said Min Kang-gi, a detective in Chungju, some 85 miles south of Seoul.
The man, identified only by his surname Kwon, told police that he accidentally killed Seo while backing up a drilling vehicle, acknowledging that the exploding cell phone story was a fabrication, Min said.
Ref: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hkHNLigBXLZt8xreluvRPKv3ZgwgD8T861LG0
“Maybe not so much stupid as brainwashed” If Americans whine because they are powerless to outspeak MSM then that leaves a little stupidity but mostly laziness to not recognize and wield the awesome power of the wallet . Are Americans too stupid to remember the Montgomery Bus Boycott and its leverage or too lazy to instigate a similar boycott of MSM . MBB was , if you recall , a massive-logistical-organizational endeavour which brought the public bus company to the brink of shutting down.
It’s extremely difficult to switch from convenient public transit to car-pooling , walking , cycling , hitch-hiking and yet boycotters did it for a year.
In comparison , how hard would it be to boycott MSM ? Flick the channel knob to any one of the many PBS channels and put duct tape over the knob. Leave the newspapers at the kiosk ; if you are fed a constant diet of manure from mainstream newspapers , you would be better off starving.
Summing up , Americans , en masse , have the power to shut down MSM with only a little effort if they would use their heads ; legs and fingers as well if they don’t have remotes.
An attempt at an example of the philosophy first expounded by the current White House when they first took office.
to paraphrase;
Reality, we create reality. You can study it but by the time you do we will have created yet another new one for you to study.
Lobo Gris
We’re brainwashing ourselves! Did you see Bill Moyers last night? Those “Evangelical Christians” wanting to bomb Iran, and the “God Bless” letter from Dubya they read? Waving American and Israeli flags while they sang hymns! My boss at work and my brother’s brother-in-law are Rush/Sean wannabes. We live in one sick effing country.
The “MSM” is more afraid of offending these loonies with the truth than crossing Rove and Cheney.
Commander_in_chimp….I would prefer to say Americans have been dumbed down and hypnotized by the box; ignorant of many important facts. I truly do not believe they/we are inherently “stupid”. Some of us have awakened enough to peer behind the curtain and the smoke and mirrors; others haven’t gotten there yet. All we can do is continue to inform as many as possible.
Every people are selectively stupid in some way.
As liberals, most of us might be alien to the world that Evangelicals live in.
The United States, being the richest and some may say, the most powerful country in the world, has had little reason to look outside of itself.
The attitude permeates the country. Simple folk everywhere are content by getting by everyday. In the United states, it is easier to do, and then some. Why would anyone look elsewhere? There is a reason the whole world wants to come here.
There is a segment in every populace that is aware. It is always a small one. Politicians everywhere pander to masses. And that is how they win. It used to be that in the “developed: nations the elected officials seemed to respond to the people’s needs.
Even when offenses by their government are serious, most people will just throw up their hands, and look at their own interests. And republicans are experts at making it look like they are taking care of YOU.
Love
Zero