Warnock Wins Reelection in Georgia

US Senator Raphael Warnock won reelection in a run-off vote in Georgia last night. The unofficial tally with 99% of precincts reporting has him leading 51.6% to 48.4%. It's a margin of almost 100,000 votes.

I am glad that Warnock won and simultaneously bothered that his challenger, former football star Herschel Walker, came so close. Walker is a clown. He embarrasses himself every time he speaks in public. The man can barely string two sentences together! When challenged on every policy position he claims to hold he quickly reveals he doesn't actually understand anything he supposedly stands for. He falls into word soup of non sequiturs, outright false statements, and conspiracy theories.

It's so obvious that Walker's nomination was a cynical exercise by Republican party leaders. They picked someone with name recognition— and, better yet, a Black man with name recognition to "prove" how they're not racist— who would talk the conservative talk, even as story after story emerged that he didn't actually walk the walk. And nearly half of Georgia voters fell for the transparently obvious ruse.

Not One but TWO Flat Tires. Mostly Carless For a Few Days.

Hawk got a flat tire driving to work on Monday. She hit a pothole hard, and one of the tires burst. Fortunately they're run-flat tires so she was able to finish her drive without stopping to change a spare tire in the rain on the side of the interstate. Monday night when she got home I spotted that a second tire had also burst.

Replacing these tires is more trouble than it ought to be. The local tire shop doesn't have either the current model or a comparable one, in our size, in stock. Getting exact replacements would take upwards of 2 weeks. Getting extremely similar replacements (same model, same size, slightly lower load rating) would take only 4 days. Thus the car is sitting in our garage until at least Friday, when we can get the flat tires replaced.

I'm mostly carless for a few days now. Could I drive the car for short distances, at low speeds? Yeah, the owner's manual says so with run-flats, and documentation on the tires says so, too. But the front tire especially looks really low. I'm worried about damage to the aluminum wheel if I drive it more than the minimum absolutely necessary.

Being mostly carless isn't too much of a pain, at least not for a few days right now. We still have one car between us. Hawk uses it to drive to work, which she needs to do at least 4 days a week. I am able to work from home.

I do like having a car at my disposal during the workday, though. I like going out for lunch for a change of pace during the workday. I also tend to run small errands, like grocery shopping, during weekdays. Those errands I can put off for a few days right now, as our pantry is well stocked. As for lunches out... well, I can clearly survive eating lunch in for a few days. And if I do get desperate, and have time for it, and it's not raining, I can walk for lunch. There are a few restaurants 0.6 miles (1km) in one direction and several more 1.1 miles in the opposite direction.

Update: I decided to walk out for lunch today. I had time, and the weather's nice. Tomorrow will be rainy.

1:23:45. Lies & Heroic Sacrifice

Yesterday I wrote about 1:23:45, the first episode of HBO's 5-part miniseries Chernobyl. In that blog I addressed just the opening scene of the episode, a crackling monologue by scientist Valery Legasov. There's a lot more to the episode than just that scene, of course. Don't expect a ratio of 1 episode = 1 blog as I write about this miniseries. There's too much to unpack. Just episode 1 will stretch to at least 3 blogs.

While the episode starts with Legasov, portrayed by actor Jared Harris, who'll be the main character of the miniseries, it switches away from him after the opening few minutes. It does that with an arrangement that is very unusual for narrative storytelling. ( Episode 1 plot twist )

The show next introduces two minor recurring characters, Vasily and Lyudmilla Ignatenko. They are awakened in the middle of the night in their Pripyat apartment by the sudden explosion less than 2km away. They see the burning reactor through their window.



Vasily is a firefighter and is shown in the poster for the episode. He knows he will be called to fight the fire so he starts getting ready. As we see later in the episode, the firefighters go right up to the wreckage of the exploded nuclear reactor. They are not afraid.

Of course, part of their fearlessness is ignorance. They literally don't know how dangerous it is. They've never been trained on what radioactivity is, despite working as emergency responders in an "atom city" devoted to staffing a nuclear power plant. The specific dangers of this accident haven't been explained either. The nuclear core has exploded, and radioactive material is literally on the ground at their feet as they carry hoses toward the fire, yet they've been told they're fighting a "roof fire" with burning tar.

The lies that left initially hundreds of people, and soon millions, unaware of mortal danger, started within seconds of the explosion. This is shown in the third scene of episode. In the control room plant operators are stunned by the explosion.



In the control room we meet characters Anatoly Dyatlov (pictured above, played by Paul Ritter), Leonid Toptunov (pictured, background), and Aleksandr Akimov (not pictured). They're all a bit stunned. They're not sure what's happened. Dyatlov, the deputy chief engineer, goes immediately into damage control mode. And by "damage control" I mean personal damage control.

Dyatlov blames Akimov and Toptunov for screwing up even though they were a) following his orders, and b) nobody's even sure what's going on yet. Despite nobody in the control room being sure what's happened, Dyatlov asserts it's an explosion in one of the control tanks. As other operators stumble into the control room to report that, no, it's not the control tanks, it's the whole reactor core, he dismisses them as delusional.

Dyatlov also blocked objective information that would've indicated the dangerous nature of the situation. Radiation dosimeters carried by the operators reported 3.6 Roentgen/hour— a level that's series but not "OMG, run away!" But as various technicians pointed out, 3.6 was the top of the scale for those dosimeters. The techs wanted to get to meters with higher scales; Dyatlov shut that down as a waste of time. It should be a requirement for passing even high school science classes to know that when a meter is pegged at the top of its scale the true measurement is likely well above that level.

The lie of 3.6 took on a life of its own. Dyatlov reported it to the plant manager and chief engineer, who relayed it up through the bureaucracy all the way to Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as to the local executive committee in Pripyat. 3.6 was key to the lie in that it was dangerous but not that dangerous. The local committee added to the situation of lies by deciding that the appropriate thing to do in this circumstance was to seal the city, so nobody could get out, and also cut the phone lines. It was an exercise in Orwellian doublethink to hold simultaneously that 1) the accepted "truth" isn't that bad yet 2) it's also so dangerous that it must be kept from people.

Thus, because information was suppressed, a number of people sacrificed themselves without realizing their danger in the moment. The firefighters took the brunt of it as they rushed in to a situation with false information and no protection.

There were instances of informed sacrifice, though. As the episode frames it, most of the operators in the plant knew what happened. Dyatlov was in denial for his own reasons, but most of the others figured it out from the information available. I mean, there was at least one person who entered the control room and said he saw the containment vessel destroyed. Others subsequently went and saw it themselves— knowing that even to look meant taking lethal doses of radiation. They knowingly walked to their own deaths believing that by doing so they would save countless other lives. Instead Dyatlov and his superiors rebuked them as liars when they confirmed reports of an open core and a full-on meltdown.

Update: keep reading: Why I watched Chernobyl - same as why Mazin created it!