Swiss exporters, who provide more than half their country’s GDP, have been hammered over the last year as the franc vaulted 30% against the euro. That the franc – along with the yen and gold bullion – is viewed as a safe repository for the world’s capital provides little value when the economy begins to tank.  “The strong national currency is presenting existential problems not only to the export sector and tourism but to the whole Swiss economy,” warned Gerold Buehrer, president of Economiesuisse.  Neither near-zero interest rates nor the imminent multi-billion dollar settlement between Swiss banks and the United States could stanch the tide of foreign money.  In fact, policy makers became so addled that the Swiss central bank considered unifying their currency with the euro, to, in effect, join the community of pending sovereign defaults (Greece, Portugal, et al.) and bank crises (e.g. Societe Generale).   Though such a radical, and antithetical move would require significant constitutional modification, “nothing,” noted central bank board member Jean-Pierre Danthine, “is excluded” from consideration.

This absurd line of reasoning is like having unprotected sex with a couple of hookers on Mermaid Avenue so that the fear of carnal befoulment won’t cramp your style on Friday nights.  Wouldn’t it be easier and equally effective to simply protect your fleshy Argo against the sirens’ plague by wearing a sheath?  You know, to put a lid on the damn thing.  In the end, the yodelers in Bern and Zurich came to such logic and simply capped the franc at 1.20 to the euro.  Their coinage thus fixed on the business end and free to wiggle out on the other.  Such an exchange rate target (vs. the German mark) was used successfully in the late ‘70s and allows the Swiss (unlike faltering Eurozone countries) to devalue as a means of economic revival.

Without question, the continent’s discordant fiscal policies and centralized monetary scheme have made for a poisonous admixture.  With the status quo clearly untenable, many are calling for dismemberment of the monetary union.  Curiously, Angela Merkel is not among them.  The German Chancellor is urging member countries to further harmonize (or, rather, subsume) their economic policies.  “We will only be able to maintain this common currency,” she opined, “if there is deeper integration.”   Good luck with that.

Here in America, we have our own problems; they’re known on this side of the pond as Republicans.  Hell bent on retaking the White House by bludgeoning our moribund economy, they steadfastly reject tax hikes as an approach to balance the budget.  Responding to the president’s $447 billion jobs bill – paid for in part by raising taxes on millionaires – Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) averred, “It would be fair to say this tax increase on job creators is the kind of proposal both parties have opposed in the past.”  Yet the evidence unassailably shows that raising marginal income tax rates does not “kill” jobs, rather it helps to create them.

In 1986, Ronald Reagan slashed the maximum income tax rate to 28%, the same percentage at which capital gains were assessed.  New business formation faltered and unemployment rose.  These trends reversed only when Bill Clinton raised the marginal income tax rate to 39% and lowered the capital gains rate to 14%.  Why?  Because the tax rate differential incentivized people to invest in businesses rather than maximize personal income.  As a result, new business incorporations accelerated, as did the level of employment.

It is most telling that Republicans desperately want to extend the Bush tax cuts even though they have been an unmitigated disaster for the nation.  Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT): “If we want to spur economic growth and reduce the deficit, then let’s stop these massive job-killing tax hikes.”  Yet the Bush tax cuts have added $2.5 trillion the national debt, and turned a budget surplus into a monstrous deficit.  Compared to Clinton’s era, W’s economic stewardship comes off as feckless and irresponsible.   Six years after their respective changes in tax policy, Bush oversaw the creation of 6.3 million new jobs (vs. 18 million for Clinton), cumulative GDP growth of 16% (vs. 26%) and an increase in real household income of 1.6% (vs. 14.7%).  On the other hand, under President Bush, the rich got even richer; in 2007 U.S. income inequality reached its highest point since the threshold of the Great Depression.  And in case you’re a member of the Tea Party, let me connect the dots for you: 2008 was the year your 401(k) disappeared and you started living in your car.

According to a recent Census Bureau report, 46.2 million Americans are living in poverty; even more are without health insurance.  Yet the 245 millionaire members of Congress seem to have no qualms with the current state of affairs. Perhaps they’re intoxicated with the growing number of our fellow citizens willing to scrub their toilets or pluck their nose hairs.  Which is why any attempt to “put more money in the hands of employers” is less about employment and more about campaign contributions.

Corporate America is sitting on $2 trillion of cash reserves, yet the unemployment rate remains mired above 9%.  Rather than hire new workers, companies such as Lowe’s, Heinz and Travelers are raising their dividends.  Others, like Verizon, Pfizer and Intel are buying back $34 billion of their own stock.  Some are left to merely buy each other.  So far this year there have been over 1200 mergers and acquisitions (recall: Broadcom snapping up NetLogic or Google swallowing Zagat’s) valued at $450 billion.

Obviously, sloshing money around the country club has done little for the economy; rich folks tend to slurry excess income into offshore hedge funds or generation-skipping trusts.  Poor folks, by way of contrast, spend every dime they get.  Earlier this year, a Congressional Budget Office analysis concluded that the most efficient way to boost the economy is to increase aid to the unemployed; extending tax cuts, on the other hand, penciled out as essentially useless.   Former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman: ”To stand before the public and rub raw this anti-tax sentiment, the Republican Party, as much as it pains me to say this, should be ashamed of themselves.”  Or perhaps Yari from Curb Your Enthusiasm put it more succinctly: “We will grab them.  We will fuck their sisters in the cunt! …   Fuck these people!”

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) is but the latest politician to be consumed by his sexual appetite. Ruefully, if there is any veracity to the latest iteration of his disclosures, he never even got his dick wet. Not waiting until social media coins a phrase for Tweet-induced ejaculation, prominent Democrats are calling for his ouster. Nonetheless, Weiner continues to scramble: after a succession of lies, including the now de rigueur I’ve-been-hacked excuse (recall: Rep. Christopher Lee), Weiner dodged New York’s Israel Day parade, hired a crisis management team and publically apologized to President Clinton, though for exactly what remains unclear. Perhaps for obtruding into Bubba’s pursuit of porn star Ginger Lee or taking surreptitious cell phone photos of Hillary’s cankles.

Sometimes these things come and go without much fanfare, as did Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), other times they harbor enough brio to resurface after years of dormancy. Former presidential candidate John Edwards was only recently indicted for using campaign funds to cover up his affair and illegitimate child, while Newt Gingrich’s proclivity for dumping wives for fresh pelt continues to plague his own aspirations for the White House. It goes without saying that Messrs. Edwards and Gingrich have but one thing to blame for the predicaments in which they find themselves: their cancer stricken wives lacked the decency to die more expeditiously.

Yet there must be something etched into the super-egos of elected officials – and of professional athletes and entertainers, for that matter – which inures them to the fear of getting caught. Dollars to donuts it is a lifetime of inconsequence, of repeatedly getting away with things that would land the rest of us in the grey bar hotel. Despite USC relinquishing its 2004 National Championship and the current tumult at Ohio State University, there are thousands collegiate football players all over the country taking free cars and wads of cash with impunity. Have been for decades. The cumulative effects are likely what create NFL players like Antonio Cromartie, who sired nine children with eight women (I guess someone was worthy of a double dip) and struggles with penury despite a $12.5 million salary.

Marv Albert and Eliot Spitzer have resurfaced on television despite a penchant for hookers and sartorial fetishes (women’s panties and black dress socks, respectively). And while it’s only a matter of time for Charlie Sheen, I’m not so sure former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) or ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn will so easily rise from the ashes. DSK had the audacity to hit on an Air France stewardess while attempting to flee the country after raping a hotel maid; Arnold knocked up his Guatemalan maid the same day as impregnating his wife. Predictably, dozens of victims have since come forward to append the copious litany of sexual predations ascribed to this pair of ageing Lotharios (e.g. Arnie’s other bastard child), enough so to fuel a whole new genre of reality shows like, for example, Real Celebrity Molestees of New Jersey.

Whether in the spotlight – Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) – or in the shadows of anonymity – Michael Lallana, a Southern Californian convicted of depositing semen in a female co-worker’s beverage – men struggle with an overwhelming primal urge to fill women with their seed. Contrary to popular mythology, however, this prurient impulse may have more to do with altruism than the wanton and incessant pursuit of self-gratification. According to a study co-conducted by Dr. Stephen M Platek, Ph.D, editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience, human semen produces felicitous effects on women. Female college students having intercourse without condoms were markedly less depressed than their counterparts, even accounting for other factors such as the use of hormonal contraceptives or the existence of a long-term relationship. And the benefits do not accrue simply from sexual activity; women who used condoms were just as depressed as those who abstained altogether. Seminal plasma, apparently, contains mood-altering chemicals – including female sex hormones – elevated levels of which can be detected in a woman’s bloodstream several hours after taking a load. Sadly, the study failed to address the differential efficacy of seminal fluid delivered via alternative orifices.

Regardless of this glaring oversight, Lazar Greenfield, M.D., was forced to abdicate his position as president-elect of the American College of Surgeons when he cited the above study in the February issue of Surgery News. Professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Michigan, Dr. Greenfield is no slouch; inventor of the Greenfield blood clot filter, he has published more than 350 scientific articles and co-authored well over 100 medical textbooks. But his quip that “there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates,” sparked protests from women’s groups that forced his resignation. To this observer, these mop squeezers don’t give a damn about the advancement of medical research. Rather, they are bitterly preoccupied with defending their ability to shove bon bons down their pie holes without spreading their legs.

Ironically, women remain obsessed with the old dangler; only last week did Jena Troutman drop her petition to ban circumcision in Santa Monica, California. Thrilled that a similar measure garnered enough signatures to appear on the November ballot in San Francisco, Georgeanne Chapin, executive director of Intact America, crowed, “We believe that it is an utterly justifiable position to ask for a legal ban on the genital cutting of boys.” Proponents cite the risk of infection and injury yet they condone the 2% morbidity rate attendant to tonsillectomies. So what is the actual impetus behind this movement? Given that Matthew Hess, who spearheaded the San Francisco initiative, has penned a cartoon of an Aryan superhero (Foreskin Man) battling an evil Hasid (Monster Mohel), the animus is not hard to discern. Unfortunately, government officials won’t address the issue of religious freedom, transfixed, as they are, by Facebook postings of Anthony Weiner’s yidishn shlong.

So President Obama accomplished in a year and a half what George Bush couldn’t (or wouldn’t – more about that anon) achieve during two full terms in office. Unfortunately, ordering the Navy to hastily dump Bin Laden’s corpse into the ocean plays like an institutionally organized version of flushing your last baggie of Acapulco Gold down the toilet before your parents search your bedroom. Mr. Obama’s machinations seem only more furtive given his adamant refusal to release photos of the deceased. Yet the reason proffered – that the gruesome imagery would further incite Islamic terrorists – holds no sway given that the phony, yet sufficiently grisly picture sent as proof to members of Congress has already coursed its way throughout the Internet. Ironically, it is Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) who now claims “the photo that I saw and that a lot of other people saw is not authentic,” while Anwar al Awlaki, for propaganda’s sake, vouches for its authenticity. Meanwhile, we Americans are supposed to be satisfied with the White House’s assertion of a DNA match and pacified by ceremonies at a midtown Manhattan firehouse and at Ground Zero. It remains for Donald Trump, then, to render the proof.

Strikingly, even hardened liberals like Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) when out of their way to credit President Bush for his part in the ultimately successful hunt for the Al Qaeda mastermind. The House Minority Leader went so far as to phone the former president: “Earlier today, I called President Bush to congratulate him and to thank him for the leadership role that he had played in this quest over the years.” President Obama even invited Mr. Bush to participate in New York, but was rebuffed with the explanation that W would rather avoid the spotlight. Or perhaps, more aptly, avoid publically confronting his guilt. A cursory review of the events leading up to September 11th can leave no impression other than the administration had advance knowledge of the attacks and thwarted any attempt to prevent them. To wit: Two terrorists on the CIA’s watch list “couldn’t be located” even though they were listed in the San Diego phone book. Warrants were denied in the case against suspicious flight student Zacarias Moussaoui. FBI field agents were fired or told to cease investigations. Explicit warnings from both the French and Russian intelligence services as well as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice described every detail save the color of the hijackers’ carry-on luggage. No fighter jets were scrambled despite a multitude of mid-continent airliner U-turns (though two were dispatched to escort golfer Payne Stewart’s uncontrolled private plane to the ground).

The most widely accepted explanation is that Mr. Bush (and this part is pure conjecture) condoned the now infamous carnage to conjure a pretext for invading Iraq. Which made absolutely no sense given Al Qaeda had no ties to Saddam Hussein in the first place. Moreover, as the United States is nearly synonymous with attacking other countries on a whim (recall: Libya, Panama, Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Honduras, Korea, Bosnia, Guatemala, etc., etc.), the horrific events of that fateful day were indeed superfluous.

Perhaps reworking the facts in his head to some exculpatory end is why Mr. Bush repeatedly claimed to have seen the first plane hit the towers on television that fateful morning when in fact video of the initial strike didn’t surface until September 12th. But even this can’t explain why Bin Laden was allowed to escape Tora Bora in late 2001 or why, in 2007, as a half dozen B-2 Stealth bombers streaked back to Osama’s mountainous Afghan lair, commanders abruptly ordered them to return to their secret base in the Indian Ocean. And yet our media is focusing its anger on Pakistan for protecting Bin Laden and harboring him for five years in a villa next to the country’s elite military academy. And while the ire may be justified, this is yet another example of the proclivity to blame outsiders rather than ourselves –especially those of our own we look to for safekeeping, like, say, cops or priests.

Which is why, despite a litany of ecclesiastical atrocities, we are shocked that the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Jesuit order is doling out $166 million to settle more than 500 child sexual abuse claims against priests across five states. As plaintiffs’ attorney Blaine Tamaki noted, “These religious figures should have been responsible for protecting children, but instead raped and molested them.” But, then again, Blaine, what’s the point of becoming a priest if you can’t butt-fuck a cornucopia of little boys? What’s left besides starchy collars, free whiskey, and a sagging cot in a dank rectory? Even jet-setting Father Philip DeRea, known as the “Indy 500 priest” for performing the marriage of actress Ashley Judd to racer Dario Franchitti and for conducting mass for Indianapolis Racing League drivers, has been sued for buggering an 11-year-old boy and subsequently offering money for a vow of silence.

It is well known that reticence is how, in the main, cops protect one another from prosecution. Sometimes, fortunately, evidence is robust enough to cleave the “thin blue line”. Despite corroborating each other’s falsified incident reports, two Denver officers were fired when videotape undisputedly showed the duo beating several women to the ground outside a diner. In New Orleans, two cops were found guilty of beating a man to death, while three others were convicted of shooting a 31-year-old and subsequently burning his body. Six more await trial for gunning down hapless victims of Hurricane Katrina. NYPD patrolman Emmanuel Tavarez, for his part, took a far more cinematic approach; impersonating the Big Apple’s finest in stolen uniforms, his gang robbed drug dealers at gunpoint. And nearly twenty years after the fact, former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for obstruction of justice and for lying under oath about torturing criminal suspects. By the time a special prosecutor ruled that Burge and several of his detectives tortured more than 100 suspects into confessing to crimes between 1972 and 1991, the statute of limitations had unbelievably run out.

Sadly, there exists no such cutoff for the consequences of Mr. Bush’s ignominious stewardship of our nation. Yes, we are no longer subject to his conceited if maladroit swagger, but have we in its stead? Little more than empty rhetoric and aboulia as we remain mired in fiscal and moral bankruptcy. Witness our government acting like some incestuous archdiocese, fecklessly reassigning air traffic controllers who fall asleep or watch movies on the job. And while Mr. Obama might have delivered some measure of justice in Abbottabad, he has failed, through his equivocation, to furnish America’s much deserved catharsis.

Bill Gross, PIMCO’s storied bond manager, recently began shorting U.S. government paper in the firm’s $236 billion Total Return Fund, because he believes the Treasury “will default on its debt; not in conventional ways… but [via] inflation, currency devaluation and low to negative real interest rates.”  Like a magisterial tuning fork picking up the resonance of a watchtower’s clanging tocsin, Standard & Poor’s reflexively echoed Bill’s dire vaticination by downgrading the credit outlook for the United States to negative, observing that “More than two years after the beginning of the recent crisis, U.S. policymakers have still not agreed on how to reverse recent fiscal deterioration or address longer-term fiscal pressures.”   Fortunately, for those investors without the bravado or wherewithal to sell short, there remains a formula to alchemize Uncle Sam’s monetary plight into some manner of personal remuneration: namely, the Barbell Strategy.

Fixed income experts would advise you, in applying this tactic, to build a portfolio of bonds clustered around two disparate nodes; of short and long duration (for simplicity, think maturity).  The bonds farther out on the yield curve will providesome income, while the cash equivalents afford flexibility to invest when rates do spike.  The middle, it goes without saying, is to be left untouched.

The barbell strategy is also being employed by Republicans in their effort to reduce the budget deficit as well as the overall level of federal indebtedness.  The plan proffered by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) relies on killing off children and the elderly as the means to reducing those pesky government entitlement programs.  Medicare will be refashioned as a voucher program whereby procedure- and claims-denying private insurance companies (that have, not surprisingly, donated $672,203 to Ryan’s campaigns) become subsidized by your tax dollars.  Huge cuts are proposed for K-12 education, low-income housing, and food stamps, along with AIDS testing, treatment and prevention.  Six million homebound seniors will be deprived of meals while the Head Start program will all but vanish.  Large chunks of Medicaid will be fobbed off to states where Republican governors can ply a more tailored form of euthanasia.  Mississippi’s Hayley Barbour:

If they would give us a block grant, we would be willing to limit the amount of our Medicaid payments from the federal government because, if we had total flexibility to run the program, we would save a lot of money.

Yeah, by letting a lot of folks die.  And other, corroboratory efforts are under way at the state level as well.  Gov. Paul LePage (R-ME) announced a 63-point plan to cut environmental regulations, highlighted by suspending a law meant to monitor poisonous chemicals that could be found in children’s products (e.g. sippy cups).  Not to be outdone, Chris Christie (R-NJ) is seeking to increase the toxicity of his state’s drinking water, most notably by promoting natural gas drilling (fracking) along the banks of the Delaware River.

Yet the real beauty of the Ryan budget is that Social Security becomes solvent without any of the requisite structural changes that could snuff out a political career faster than Craigslist; it simply liquidates a large portion of those stubbornly extant retirees leeching off America’s workforce.  And while middle-aged folks are nottotally left alone, their tax burden is reduced to a niggling 25% marginal rate.  It is this proviso, according to the Brookings Institute, that neuters the plan in terms of deficit reduction – saving a paltry $155 billion over 10 years – while engendering a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich (think: Ryan as Sheriff of Nottingham).

That Douglas Fairbanks’ 1922 film Robin Hood has been remade more times than Joan Rivers’ face can nothing to diminish the impact of the original.  It is this manner of unfettered adoration that greets the cinematic debut of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.  My libertarian friends would aver that Rand’s Objectivist tome best encapsulates the polity’s zeitgeist; government (taxation, regulation, venality) is the problem while personal gratification represents morality in its highest form  (see: Tea Party, Charlie Sheen).  These very devotees, however, also underwrite class action lawsuits (Accutane, Phillip Morris, Tyco), which is tantamount to conceding the evils of industry.  Detractors could argue, therefore, that the more apt film is Augustus Thomas’ 1914 adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.  

 Sinclair’s expose of the meatpacking establishment led to the formation of the FDA, an agency, given the recent recalls of spinach and hamburger meat, requisite to this day.  In fact, a new study suggests that HALF of the meat and poultry sold in our nation’s supermarkets may be tainted with staphylococcus and one quarter contains drug-resistant MRSA.  No doubt, then, that public health is an appropriate government concern: Only last week did officials confirm that over 100 party goers contracted Legionnaire’s disease in the Playboy Mansion hot tub.  Even at Hef’s, one could reasonably gamble that the chlorine would likely kill gonorrhea and dissolve any genital warts, but who has the foresight to consider Legionnaire’s?

Perhaps the most telling sign of the times is that we are debating the gravitas of movies, rather than books in setting our social compass.  It goes beyond the demise of Barnes and Noble and the advent of electronic publishing; we have become so lazy that we would eschew the act of reading for passively watching a message delivered on screen.  In that case, if you really want to get a handle on the Republican agenda, you may want to watch Soylent Green.

Sarah Palin’s poll numbers are ebbing among Republicans as a growing number acknowledge that she does not possess the requisite intellect to serve as an elementary school librarian, let alone President of the Untied States. But that is not to say that the current occupant of the Oval Office hasn’t freebooted an idea or two from the former Alaska governor. Like that bit about hunting wolves from helicopters. Mr. Obama, frustrated with the endless failures of two mid-East ground wars, has gone after Muammar Gaddafi from the skies. And the Kosovo-like strategy has already borne fruit; Libyan rebels have retaken several cities as well as two strategic oil refineries since the aerial campaign began. And while Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh negotiates the terms of his resignation, Mr. Gaddafi adamantly refuses to go gentile into that swarthy good night. Perhaps a couple of tomahawk missiles could provide a more spectacular departure.

In a display of wanton bipartisanship, Kansas state representative Virgil Peck (R-Tyro) cribbed the same page from the Palin playbook , suggesting that the hunters in whirlybirds used to cull the feral hog population could gun down illegal immigrants as well. Pressed by reporters, Peck rejoined, “I was just speaking like a southeast Kansas person.” After an awkward pause, he scratched his chin and added, “I’m not too sure about their rib meat, but think of the savings to our budget.”

It is precisely because fiscal constraints do alter the fabric of society, that the Parliament in Lisbon, despite a public deficit eclipsing 8.5% of GDP, thumbed its collective nose at last-ditch austerity measures. Once Prime Minister Jose Socrates resigned in protest, President Anibal Silva had no choice but to dissolve the government. And while the European Union dithers over whether or not to bail out Portugal (recall: Greece and Ireland), Moody’s, anticipating contagion, swiftly lowered ratings on Spanish sovereign debt and downgraded dozens of Spanish banks. I remain flummoxed therefore, given the metaphoric meltdown in Europe and the literal one in Japan, why Warren Buffet is so damn bearish on the dollar.

More specifically, the Sage of Omaha recently predicted a significant decline in the long-term purchasing power of the greenback. Perhaps this is because so many stateside investments have been built on quicksand. Unthinkable sums of money have been swallowed by the likes of WorldCom, Enron, Bernie Madoff, and for the more antediluvian investor – those of us extant before the Bloomberg iPhone app – ZZZZ Best Carpet Cleaning. This last gem was the brainchild of Barry Minkow who eventually did a seven year stretch in the grey bar hotel before finding Jesus and re-christening himself a “fraud-detection expert”. An ordained pastor and consultant to both the F.B.I. and the S.E.C., Minkow also went after publically traded companies with suspect financials. After one Nicolas Marsch III failed to shakedown (think: Michael Milken) Lennar Corp. over a disputed $37 million, Minkow was hired to bash the company. Problem is he shorted the stock before offering a negative report (think Barron’s) that sent the stock 20% lower. Barry plead guilty to a federal charge of conspiracy and is heading back to the poky where, this writer predicts, he will be fancied as a bashert by more than a few inmates (think: Jean Genet) before reconverting to Judaism (think: Bob Dylan).

For those who thought my earlier mention of the Japanese nuclear disaster was no more than a callous throwaway line, you couldn’t be further from the truth. I pushed this section to the rear as I remain deeply troubled by the fact that we have, in the span of one lifetime, nuked them again. Yes, we, or more precisely, General Electric. The failed reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was GE’s Mark 1 design, infamous for its notoriously flimsy containment system. GE engineer Dale Bridenbaugh quit his job 35 years ago because the Mark 1 wasn’t “designed to withstand the loads” commensurate with a large-scale incident. His warnings, he recalled, weren’t taken “seriously enough.” Around the same time, Stephen Hanauer, then a safety official with the Atomic Energy Commission, advocated scrapping the Mark 1 because of susceptibility to explosion and rupture from a buildup of hydrogen. In other words, 8.9 magnitude earthquakes and tsunamis aside, safety concerns have abounded for over a quarter century. More terrifying, perchance, is the fear, first promulgated by Ishiro Honda’s classic 1954 horror film Godzilla, that a nuclear explosion could turn an ordinary marine iguana into Tokyo-destroying monster. Not to mention wildly de-syncing foreign language voiceovers.

The rest of the story, as you no doubt know, is ongoing; spewing radioactive seawater, expanding evacuation zones, recovered bodies of power plant workers and tainted milk as far away as California. The Japanese, ever resilient, are seeking revenge in more ways than poisoning our food supply. They got beloved comedian Gilbert Gottfried fired as the AFLAC duck after he texted the following jokes:

“I just broke up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, ‘There’ll be another one floating by any time now.”

“Japan is really advanced. They don’t go to the beach; the beach comes to them.”

Then their death threats (presumably sent from campus libraries via cell phones) forced UCLA student Alexandra Wallace into hiding after her “Ching Chong” video went viral. But the Yanks are fighting back: In the wake of Ms. Wallace’s diatribe, New York City Ballet company member Devin Alberda tweeted: “Yellowface character in NYCB’s 2010 revival of The Magic Flute the worst thing to happen to the Asian American community since [the internment camps].” Given the recent discourse, I might be led to believe otherwise.