Another conspiracy?

Caught The China Syndrome, the 1979 nuclear power plant disaster movie, on TV tonight. A character in the movie says that a nuclear meltdown could result in an area the size of Pennsylvania becoming permanently uninhabitable. And the filmmakers clearly had an agenda: to damage the nuclear power industry. Do you know what happened just twelve days after the movie was released? The famous Three Mile Island nuclear power plant disaster. Do you know where Three Mile Island is? Pennsylvania. Do you know what happened after the accident? The movie took off at the box office. And construction of new nuclear power plants effectively ceased.

Coincidence? Put on your thinking caps, people! Don't be sheeple!

Was the Three Mile Island accident engineered by Columbia Pictures (the film’s distributor) and its allies in the anti-nuclear movement so as to generate publicity for the movie? Was the reference to “Pennsylvania” an inadvertent slip by a screenwriter or actor having foreknowledge of the event? In the same year, Columbia Pictures co-produced the Steven Spielberg flop 1941 with Universal Studios. Universal was at the time controlled by mogul Lew Wasserman, well-known as a patron of the Democratic Party. Jimmy Carter, the president at the time and a Democrat, visited the site of the Three Mile Island disaster, thereby lending the power of his office to fostering the perception that the accident was a major one which ought to raise concerns about nuclear power. Carter’s daughter Amy once famously advised her father that the control of nuclear arms was the most pressing issue in the election of 1980 -- one year after the movie and the accident.

Again, could this all just be coincidence?

Hey, I’m just asking questions here. Surely more research is needed?

The answer, of course, is yes, it is just a coincidence. And no, no further "research" is needed. Such “eyebrow-raising coincidences” are a dime a dozen, and are utterly meaningless. People overly impressed with Marvin Bush’s “links” to Larry Silverstein or Prescott Bush’s “links” to Hitler take note.

People predisposed to believe that there is a leftist screenwriter lurking under every bed will, of course, no doubt see in this something more than coincidence – just as someone predisposed to look for Zionists or neo-cons under every bed will see all sorts of strange things in other entirely innocent patterns. But the “six degrees of separation” phenomenon has a name because it is real, and what it shows is that there are all sorts of patterns in social affairs that tell us… precisely nothing of interest.