If you are trying to dodge the blame for a great disaster, the best policy is to say that it was God's will. So Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visiting one of the 6,000 buildings that collapsed on their sleeping residents in eastern Turkey last week, said: "Such things have always happened. It's part of Destiny's plan."
A very angry Turkish woman on the television news had a simpler explanation for the 33,000 dead already found under the wreckage and the many more to come: "Earthquakes don't kill people! Buildings kill people!"
To be precise, cheaply built high-rise housing that flouts the regulations about making dwellings earthquake-proof kills people -- by the tens of thousands. But it is possible to construct high-rise buildings that will not "pancake" down on their residents in an earthquake.
