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Showing posts from May, 2020

America's COVID-19 Deaths Surpass Chernobyl

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  I just binge-watched HBO's Chernobyl yesterday... all 6 1/2 hours of it. Here's the IMDB link . I wasn't really planning to do that. Susan had encouraged me to give the show a try and watch the first episode. It's a dramatization, but based pretty closely on the real events (with some errors as I'll note later). I was hooked almost immediately, unable to look away as the tragedy of the disaster unfolded, which won out over my need for a break from the emotional wear and tear. It's been a while since I've watched something so horrifying and sad. It's hard to miss the parallels to today's crisis. President Trump himself chose to frame the battle against Covid-19 as a war. Well, sure, you can think of it like that. It's a struggle in which people are dying, though the opponent is a force of nature instead of a human one. You could view the Chernobyl disaster, and especially the effort to contain it and recover from it, in the same terms. Once the...