Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/10/university-of-hawaiis-creepy.html
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This whole damn thing creeps me right the fuck out.
And my father was away on duty during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I can’t be exactly sure that total annihilation has ever felt closer.
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Given that a significant number of their missile tests blow up prematurely (if they make it off the ground), I doubt they can even hit what they are aiming at, even if they manage the range necessary.
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The real danger would be if Trump made a preemptive strike and China came to NK’s defense. Things could get ugly very quickly.
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That means everyone gets a “A” for the semester?
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That’s what growing up in Europe in the 1970ies/1980ies was like.
Ahh, halcyon days…
Anyway:
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Time to bring back Bert the Turtle and “Duck and Cover”
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Personally this doesn’t seem that creepy to me. It’s potentially practical advice for the world we live in today. It doesn’t hurt to know ahead of time what to do when the alarm sounds, since you won’t have to read the instructions during the attack.
If you are talking about North Korean attacks there’s a decent chance you would survive the attack if you took the right precautions both during and after the attack.
Personally I don’t think Kim is likely to launch missiles. This sort of saber rattling always happens when they have a bad crop yield. Still, it only takes a few minutes to know what to do in the event of an emergency. Why leave yourself ignorant?
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Yeah, the Scripps Oceanographic campus in La Jolla has plans for tsunami evacuation (including signs as to minimum terrain elevation to be safe). Given that it has never experienced one, it might be seen as alarmist, but I could well see the institute being blamed for endangerment if one happened and they had no plan.
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Jesus Christ I did not know about the EMP aspect. I feel sick.
Higher Education has a very strong culture of CYA. It’s likely that somebody said “What if there’s a nuclear atttack”, and the administration could not help but send email warning the university community…so that nobody could blame them for failing to act.
Well that’s comforting: North Korea might fail to incinerate Hawaii.
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It is likely in fact. 
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Get under your desk.
Put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.
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As UH faculty I got this email; it mainly serves a pointer to a powerpoint from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, which was not designed for the university alone. HEMA designs these things to be scary, so that the response to emergencies is rapid. They’re really pretty effective, in the sense that people here do react to emergency warnings impressively quickly.
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“…we will regretfully be unable to refund your tuition payments. You will, however, remain subject to the terms of your student loan.”
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Unless, you know, certain folks in power, twisted fuckers, actually thought it might be politically expedient (would distract) if such an event were to actually occur. Maybe even folks fucked-up enough to, I dunno, place bets on Wall Street ahead of the event, you know, kind of like what happened on 9-11. And btw I’m not a “9-11 truther” by any traditional definition, but some seriously sketchy shit was going on there, at a different level than “the WTC was blown up by missiles/bombs.”
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It wouldn’t need to even come to that. If N.Korea wipes out S.Korea’s manufacturing base in the first 48 hours of a salvo, the global economy collapses, period. Almost every electronic device made has parts sourced from S.Korea, parts that take hundreds of millions to billions of dollars worth of factory investments which take years to build… No more smartphones and MANY other things we take for granted…
So you don’t think there’s any implication to public universities sending mass emails to their student-bases with the subject of “In the event of a nuclear attack?” This, to me, is like saying the fact that if you watch TV you face a litany of drug ads that are illegal in almost every other country, and it has no effect on the populace (including the fact that half the ads are streams of statements about horrible side-effects).
