The phenomena explaining that the flutter of a butterfly in South America can eventually cause a cataclysmic earthquake in Russia has never meant much to me; I was always a believer in a direct cause and effect. An earthquake causes a tsunami. A tsunami causes thousands of deaths. A tsunami causes a nuclear reactor crisis. In my head one concrete event typically led to another concrete, tangible event. If there’s nothing else I learned through my schooling, however, I learned that events that take place around the world in the past and present have a direct effect on the rest of the world’s future.
This particular political cartoon is a distortion on the normal Japanese flag of the red sun, and alters it into a weeping skull warning of poison. The caption of the cartoon is “The Land of the Rising Sun Turns Into the Land of the Rising Radiation Levels”, and normally that would be the only implication the cartoon had, but I could not help think about the Stock Market Game lessons taught in Mr. Sweeney’s class and how the market will either go up or down because of this event. The current civil war in the nation of Libya has caused gas prices to increase around the world, but the Japanese radiation level crisis will presumably force factories to shut down and goods that were previously being shipped from that part of the country to be curtailed. What does this mean for the market? It may be presently effected do to the lack of production by auto-mobile companies such as Toyota, but the world’s constant, hard supply-and-demand will force it to go back up again; it Toyota cars cannot be made in The Land of the Rising Radiation Levels, then they will be made elsewhere.
:)
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