What is going on?

Apparently, a number of entertainers have gotten into trouble for making jokes about the recent tragedies in Japan--many of them being fired as a result.  The bright side to this is that we know that even in Hollywood, there are some things that are unacceptable.  Sadly, this kind of moral discernment is not always apparent there!

Obviously, this kind of thing is nothing new--I remember jokes about Waco and Jeffrey Dahmer, and I once met a former U-boat sailor who heard Holocaust jokes in New York.  Going deeper, though, I think sometimes our video entertainment and lack of education may be partially responsible.

Put simply, when you put the news stories in the hands of someone who grew up watching Godzilla movies and never learned logarithms, they are going to have difficulty cluing in to the extent of the carnage.  9.0 sounds like "not much worse" than 7.0 until you understand a logarithmic scale, right?

Which leads me to a well-worn soapbox of mine; if one desires one's children to be truly educated, one cannot stop with the Trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, but must also go to the Quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.  Anything less can lead to your children making Godzilla jokes when tens of thousands are dead and reactors are starting to melt down.