when Russia admitting an accident was news itself!
Lies are what bind people into a manufactured reality that stymies their ability to live free and meaningful lives.
If we run with the cost trope, look at lies like a shady drug deal.
You are angry and want to buy some satisfaction. You lost your job, or can’t buy a house, the cost of living is too high. Whatever it is, you are looking for relief.
So a a shady dealer offers you a lie to give you some relief. You give them some personal freedom monthly and they sell you “immigration did this to you” and it works for awhile. But you start to realize the immigration story doesn’t hit the same way. You look for relief in new lies. So you give the dealer more freedom, and buy “its not just immigrants, its obviously trans people.” Yeah that’s it, those trans people are turning the steel factories into drag theaters, wrecking the economy. “Damn!” You think. “Its not my fault, its them!” The relief you get from the lies hooks you more.
The hook is powerful. But you’re never satisfied and you need more lies as your brain adjusts, maybe even protests. You’ve got to shut it up, and you start to conflate your issues with freedom itself. You’re happy to give more freedoms over to the dealer for relief through even grander lies.
The relief will always be temporary, but you don’t even realize that any more.
You’ll never solve the problems that plagued you and you’ll die angry and depressed. Maybe if you gave up just a little more freedom, you could have had a better life. You never awaken to reality that the people taking your freedoms are the ones ruining your life. The lies were too powerful, too addictive, and they rewired you to willingly accept your own servititude.
That’s the cost of lies.
Just finished watching this and it’s one of the best miniseries I’ve seen. It did such an incredible job of portraying the oppressiveness of the Soviet state and its impact on its citizens. I found it a bit soul crushing seeing the parallels to what’s currently happening in the US when ideology comes first.
I saw it as one rogue asshole boss causing a disaster.
US tried to downplay three mile island.
Wow! That boss sure had A LOT of sway over the USSR to enforce reactor rods with graphite tips! And to have intentionall held back computer technology in the reactor!
It truly is a brilliant show, in a depressing sort of way.
We have no idea what the cost of lies is because nowhere in the world is there a baseline of truth to clock it against. Russia’s biggest problem is that they let the info get out. This is FAR from the first time a country fucked up containment, you would just never hear about it.
Funnily enough, this isn’t even the worst leak of a disease from a lab in Russia. That honor (probably) going to the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak in 1979 which killed at least 68 people.
US military spread bacteria over the west coast in operation sea spray in 1950. 11 hopitalized. One dead.
Scientists told the military that post war nuclear testing should occur off the east coast because of prevailing winds. Military: fuck you and here’s your cancer.
WHO is still asking Russia for more details, including what actually caused the lab worker’s death and reports of a second pneumonia case.
https://twitee.co/DrTedros/status/2107591815863968121
So I guess we’re still at the “not enough information” stage.
Pneumonia is not rare. 2.5 million a year die of it.
That’s like saying MRSA is no big deal because millions of people die every year from bacterial infections.
They’re studying some outlier versions of an illness with a much worse outcome.
the people in wuhan said the same thing just before things expanded out of control
If you believe the lab leak theory.
i do
I still remember reading reddit threads about what looked like mass incineration of human remains and the speculations thereabout.
And NY morgues had to use refrigerated trailers for over a year.
wasnt that for ebola in africa?
It was definitely some random scary bullshit on the internet that co-mingled the two. But so much of the hype in the early days of COVID ended up being FUD used by the administration to justify draconian anti-immigration policies. We had FOX News screaming about Leprosy and “Mexican Flu” being transmitted by Migrant Caravans decades before that. Any disease outbreak became an excuse to hyper-police people entering the US at the borders.
Part of the problem with all this disease discourse is that it’s routinely anti-foreigner agitprop. This goes straight back to The Spanish Flu, which originated from a Haskell County, Kansas pig farm and got spread across Europe by WW1-era US soldiers. It became major weapon of the 20th century reactionary right to ban Italian Immigrants way back then. Now we see disease scares used to freeze out everyone from Taiwan to Brazil to Afganistan. If anyone is sick anywhere, it’s an excuse to ban migrants everywhere.
No, but it did involve George Clooney’s satellites for darfur. This was around new years and we’ll before anyone even thought about viruses.
They had some sort of images of lots of dirt that got moved and some sort of chemical spectrum analysis from… somewhere idk, but the ne of the chemicals was something that occurs when bodies are burned.
The general thought was that it was anti Chinese conspiracy kind of building off the Uyghur, but it was in a different place, or a new ethnic realignment of similar ilk.
I think I’ve seen this before.
For those who need to know more:
Local media have reported that the institute has subsequently been locked down, with staff forced to sleep on the floor and on chairs. “They’ve been isolating everybody since Friday – more than 60 people,” one relative, Roman, told the news portal Siberia.Realities.
He said family members were allowed to drop off food at a checkpoint while tests were carried out inside the building. Similar quarantine restrictions have been placed on several other hospitals in and around the city.
At least this time around they seem to be treating it seriously instead of trying to cover it up to save face I guess?
They do both “nothing to see here” while trying their
worstbest to contain it.My money is on them shipping infected people to the front lines while saying they are just in quarantine.
A few weeks later “oh noes they all ded frum virus” meanwhile they just spread it to all their own troops while claiming it’s just a flu and everyone is fine.
sigh
I’ll get the 400 tons of sand and boron.
2019: The Sequel - 7 Years Later ☣️
3.6
RoentgenPPM, not great, not terriblewho are these people?
From the HBO show Chernobyl. It’s really well made and worth watching.
I’ve never seen a more accurate depiction of my typical experience in a professional environment. “Nobody wants to speak up or handle things correctly because someone senior with direct responsibility for your employment shouted down any dissent because they want to meet a metric” is apparently a timeless experience.
The show was very well done, but it implies this was history. That mass of reactor is still burning underground, and Russian bombs have damaged the sarcophagus covering it. The remaining reactors are still in use.
burning
no, it’s not. if it was burning something would be coming out. melting might be a description, but it’s not even doing that… smouldering maaaybe?
you are 100% correct that russia is playing stupid games with their radiological fuckup, and that should stop immidiately.
re: remaining reactors - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant
according to wiki they have been decommissioned and are in a state of cool down; power needs to be maintained in order to keep cooling pumps going for the reactor cores; but power is not being generated and comes from off site.
Chernobyl shut down its last active reactor a decade ago.
Whoops… they also had more fires after the meltdown, in other reactors.
Really scary to think about the burning mass in the underground…
Also very abstract to think about that.
I first watched it on an airplane. Swapping between the seat screen and my phone. Great show. Can’t wait to watch it again someday
Then I watched it on a big(?) ((I guess 60inch?) TV at home. Great show. Let’s make sure I’m in the right mental space before I rewatch the show…)
mild spoilers for history I guess
The hospital scenes on a much bigger screen. Seeing the (I know its all dramatised) impact of lies on a bigger screen really affected me.
Every lie that is told incurs a debt to the truth. A debt that shall one day be repaid.
