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Your Average News Is a Disgusting Sewer of Lies. (So, Check Out ‘The Land of Confusion Ricochet Podcast’)
So, I watched the local Boise TV at 5:30 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. I was cooking, so I thought that some useless background noise wouldn’t bother me. Man, I was wrong. So very, very wrong. According to channel four or five or whatever, the main new thing is that everybody should be scared of the Nuclear Reactor in Ukraine because it will be like Chernobyl.
According to actually intelligent and honest people on Ricochet, nuclear power plants are insanely resilient. The American government sent a 747 via remote into a nuclear power plant. It barely made a dent. You need a bunker buster bomb to even begin to get to leaking radioactivity. No Ukrainian or Russian wants leaking radioactivity, so they bomb whoever controls that nuclear power plant in order to shoot out the power grid.
Additionally, the few times that I pay attention to local news, I notice that they don’t mention that about 95 percent of monkeypox cases are limited to promiscuous homosexual males. (Some statistics say it’s 99 percent or and some statistics say it’s 94 percent. But whatever the specifics are, we know who we should focus on.)
I am continuously shocked at how little left-wing people know about right-wing or classically libertarian philosophy anything. So I ask the Adam Carolla question, “Stupid or liar?”
Do they know how monkeypox spreads? Do they know that nuclear power plants are actually really hard to blow up? Or are they just into rating?
Whatever the answer is, I still hate them and everyone should subscribe to Ricochet where everyone is smarter and more honest than the utter foolishness on your local TV newscast.
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Maybe the news is all you say but it is the reality for most the country. It is why they do what they do and vote the way they vote. It is what recorded history will be.
I’m not so sure the nuclear plant in question is hard to blow up. It is a product of Soviet engineering and quality, probably similar to the one in Chernobyl.
Thans Mr. Sunshine. I am aware of the immense power of lies. Man is it intense, But reality has a say. I think that’s the story of Communism. Even if everyone wants to believe a lie, lies are still lies so what everyone believes is of secondary importance to plain reality.
“Water is always wet and fire always burns”, as an Englishman once said. And perhaps this is a good thing because we are constantly reminded that fire is hot hot no matter how many times our hand goes warbling back to the fire.
Well that may be True. I am ignorant of all things engineering. So what media should do is talk to a bunch of engineers (particularly ex-Soviet engineers and figure out what it means to launch rockets on a Soviet nuclear plant. But instead, they pedal fear.
When the illustrious Ricochetti member, Spy Guy said that he researched Nuclear Plants and realized that they were more solid than anything depicted on television, all the other knowledgable war scholars quietly agreed. By all means they should get a second opinion or third or fourth opinion. Honestly, in the thirty seconds they gave to the Nuclear Plant. They should have said one of three things.
1) Our engineering consultants say that the Nuclear Plant has almost no chance of spreading radiation through conventional bombing.
2) Our engineering consultants say that the Nuclear Plant has a serious risk of leaking radiation.
3) Our engineering consultants have differing opinions.
Then they have an article with references on their website. Even in the unlikely event that they are right about the nature of Nuclear Plants. They don’t friggin research.
I’m not sure which parts of your post are in which voice (straight, sarcastic, strident, suspicious), so I’ll just chill for a bit.
Meanwhile, I can absolutely see Putin blowing up a nuke plant in Ukraine and as the rest of the world wring its hands, he comes on TV to tell the Ukrainians to put down their rifles and pick up their shovels if they don’t like the contamination.
Putin is hardly above being vindictive on a grand scale.
Is this your claim, or from the podcast, or the media? At any rate, I don’t believe the USG ever crashed a 747 into anything on purpose. I just kind of think that I would know.
Uh oh. A Truther speaks out.
It might be possible that some strategically placed artillery could degrade the cooling system somehow. Here in Texas we had a nuke plant go offline because a temperature sensor in a coolant line froze on one very cold day. Obliterating the containment structure is impossible. That said, many nuclear plants store their spent fuel and low-level waste “out back”. It is possible that some strategically placed artillery could damage the containment of that waste and mess up the ground water. I think if a Ricochet member was to Google such things, they might get a visit from the FBI.
No 747s were harmed on 9/11. Just sayin.
Actually, it appears that an F4 was crashed into a concrete block, not a 747 into a nuke plant. The video does not say by whom. If you watch this, listen to the narration once through and then stop your sound, the audio repeats several times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPe-bKIid8w
As one of the panel participants, I’ve had a request to step into the post here to expand on my comments RE: threats posed by the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. My background is not as a nuclear physicist or reactor engineer; rather as a U.S. Army Chemical Corps Officer, trained in CBRNE (chem, bio, rad, nuke, and explosive effects). My last assignment before retiring was commanding a specialized unit of CBRNE subject matter experts who do technical threat analysis, assess risks, and make recommendations for responses to situations like this. (These are REALLY smart Soldiers…mostly PhD and MS degrees in their fields.) So, why do I feel the threat posed here doesn’t merit greater worry?
1. The threat posed by a potential core melt down is real, but restricted by several factors. Even crappy Soviet pre-1986 designed reactors were designed with multiple default safeguards in place. Chernobyl happened because the stupid Soviet engineers purposefully shut all those safety features off and then initiated the emergency as a training event. that’s not the situation here.
2. The containment domes over the reactor cores (pictures I’ve seen show three reactors) are designed to sustain extremely high internal pressure in the event of a core meltdown. This has the secondary effect of making them very resistant to external point impact. Can they be breached by air attack? Sure. But why? If the intent is to create a radiological contamination event similar to a “dirty bomb” attack, just use a dirty bomb. Why muck-about with an air attack that might not work?
3. The Ukrainians want the plant back, intact and operational; they’re not likely to strike at the reactors. The Russians want the plant disabled for now, so that it’s not producing power that assists the Ukrainian war effort. Eventually, Russians will start start re-engineering the plant to supply power to the occupied territories or send it to Russia directly. So, their efforts now are to shut it down (intact) and re-start it later.
4. Lastly, the radiological effects of a dirty bomb explosion are notoriously hard to control. Radioactive fall out is as likely to affect Russian military forces (already stressed) and civilians in occupied territories. This would be especially bad, as the Russians would be risking turning such civilians into hostile insurgents. (@torywarwriter disagrees with me on the potential for Ukrainian insurgency, and he has good points to make.)
Why invade in the first place? Reasonable assumptions are just that. Plenty of “why would they do that?” things nonetheless get done by people with different motivations from us. Perhaps there’s a fat-man-and-trolley effect at play. Sending a dirty bomb demonstrates more culpability than scattering your Uranium.
Did anybody suggest the Ukes would do it?
@TWW assures us there are no Russians in Ukraine.
update: I would like to thank Post-Modern Hoplite for updating some information.
Opposition to nuclear power is an example of an idea that’s hard to dislodge not because it’s wrong, but because it was – and, I suppose, is – virtuous. Anything nuclear was bad, post 1979. Weapons, power plants – it was all earth-killing poison. NUKE THINGS represented three hated targets:
1 Malevolent corporations, which skimped on maintenance and covered up things (I mean, you saw the Jane Fonda Movie.)
2 Capitalism, which rewarded #1, and also had an inbred bias towards the anti-natural and synthetic, which is why they hated solar and wind, and loved nukes. Since Capitalism is short-sighted and doesn’t care for the human race, they were indifferent to the waste, and were content to kill millions in the future to make a buck today.
3 The Right, which had an aggressive posture towards the Soviet Union, due to our irrational hatred of their system. This meant the Soviets had no choice but to match us bomb-for-bomb, and this might result in a war that would ruin the world, reducing the population to one lone man (Kevin Costner) in a dystopian wilderness, trying to deliver a letter containing Jonathan Schell’s last royalty check.
1,2, and 3 combine nicely into the nuclear warning symbol. Opposing these bad things meant you were not onlt correct, you cared about the planet, which bestows virtue.
Move to today, when the safety of the industry is demonstrated, the potential for reducing the Gaia-smothering caul of CO2 is unquestioned, and you’d think opposition would no longer be automatically virtuous. But it is, because A) the Boomer generation is unable to shed their adolescent certainties, because that would mean being, like, old, man, and like, wrong? and B) Wind and solar are natural, not artificial. The Wind and the Sun simply move upon our machines and bestow their gifts. You can almost hear Joan Baez singing as the blades move. Well, you would, if it wasn’t drowned out by the sound of the blades.
As for Monkeypox, the assumption is this: if they reported that most of the cases were among gay men, then people would disengage and not be particularly concerned or interested, which would be bad, because most of the cases are among gay men, and that means people would be indifferent about something that is disproportionately affecting a marginalized community.
Make sense?
So the canary-in-the-coal-mine angle comes into play. The Monkeypox outbreak is confined, thus far, to a section of urban gay men engaged in a certain set of behaviors, but it could break out any minute now. As with the AIDS epidemic, the etiology is described in a sequence that’s supposed to make everyone feel vulnerable: a pregnant wife who doesn’t know that her husband occasionally does the Gay Thing on the downlow gets infected, and passes it on to her baby, who is BORN WITH MONKEYPOX. Since nothing is as innocent as a newborn, that tells everyone that it’s a threat to everyone.
The odd thing about this framing, as with AIDS, is that it shifts the focus from the people who are statistically most likely to suffer to the people least likely to suffer. The media regards the innocent wife as more intrinsically virtuous, because her plight gets better ratings. Or vice versa. The ideal media story is an unmarried Vassar grad in her early 40s who works in the media and gets monkeypox from a sperm donor who worked in a nuclear plant, and comes down with a plutonium-enhanced version of Monkeypox that can be spread by eye contact. I think we all know that means lockdown, fast, and hard.
As hilarious as this passage is, I can’t help but find it disturbing. So you are telling me that the media consciously conceals important realities in order to sell news to scared people who don’t research? How do they sleep at night?
What if the father of the baby with Monkeypox watched the nightly news with his wife and the news accurately reported that the disease overwhelmingly affects promiscuous gay men.
That would incentive the husband to be more careful about the gay thing. I forget the book but apparently there is a moving tale of a gay man treating his partner while he dies of AIDs. The author mentions in the book that if the medical authorities were quicker to close down the bathhouses his boyfriend might not have died. Not reporting accurately has serious consequences which is why I am so incensed at such bad reporting.
Not similar.
Chernobyl had graphite moderated RBMK reactors. The other UA stations use a Soviet VVER version of a pressurized water reactor.
RBMK had two main issues.
First, it was not even idiot resistant, let alone idiot proof. The complex interaction between fuel rods, water, graphite moderator, and control rods created situations where what seemed intuitive to slow the reaction actually sped it up.
Second, is that the graphite can burn and becomes an effective wide area dispersal mechanism for fallout.
Stupid or liar ?
I’m not sure what most people know about a nuclear reactor located in Ukraine. I’d be vulnerable to believing anything I read about how dangerous it is.
I’m pretty sure people on the left know 94 to 99% of people getting monkeypox, right now, are gays. I’m pretty sure they know that monogamous couples aren’t in any danger. You’re probably recognized by Leftists as well mannered if you always act like that isn’t known.
I don’t think they consciously conceal important realities on some things. They are wired to see a different approachthat broadens understanding and raises consciousness. Some issues come pre-shaped for your convenience, because they don’t want the facts falling into the wrong hands.
Yeah, he plant in question is a VVER, which is similar to the most common American commercial reactor designs. They are far, far safer than the RBMK reactors that were at Chernobyl.
RBMK reactors have a nasty feedback loop where more water boiling mean the power / heat generation increases, and also a control rod design that was like a car that pushed the accelerator before activating the brake. It had no reinforcement to its reactor building.
Now, losing outside power / access to a nuclear plant is a big problem. Nuclear plants are not designed to power themselves with no other load, and they need cooling even when in shutdown. It’s fairly easy to shut down a well-designed nuclear reactor – it is called a SCRAM. Once the reactor is shut down, the nuclear reaction is done, but the fuel is emitting an absolutely insane amount of radiation. (If you drove over a spent nuclear fuel rod at highway speed you would still manage to get a lethal dose) This amount of energy requires cooling water, and lots of it. Lose the cooling circulation, and the fuel will boil off the water and keep getting hotter. To avoid that and provide other required power, the plant has diesel generators – a bit like the battery in your car. They are built for long run time and can get the plant running again.
The problem is the diesel generators are not always in as protected of an area as the reactor. Losing them could have severe consequences, especially if the power plant is blockaded. That was what got Fukushima – the tidal wave took out the diesels.