5 Comments

Matt, during years over a very varied work history, I have seen unbelievable horrors and near horrors of inattention inadequacy and outright deliberate malfeasance for expediancy and profit. Boy do I have stories. Right up to long

term construction time (and delayed by lies) essential products delivered to one of the most top level secure nuclear military sites on earth, which after all the delays, wouldn't fit where they had to go. And the risk of taking down the grid connected to a California nuclear power plant for months, by an oil co crew who wanted to avoid a million dollar shutdown. Anyone who thinks the supposed safeguards preventing accidental

nuclear deployment can't fail, is sadly ignorant or has a job to protect and is lying. It's almost happened more than once.

Expand full comment

If Bush and Obama wanted it taken off alert, why didn’t they just darn well do it then? After all, they were in charge, right?

Expand full comment

Sounds like the Black Swan events that Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a book about.

Expand full comment

Great article. I like the way you tie together the "Never Events" of individual medical mess-ups with the existential threat of nuclear war -- which as I wrote awhile back is "out of fashion" and something we're not supposed to worry about anymore:

https://punditman.substack.com/p/unchecked-militarism-is-all-the-rage

I often ask myself whatever happened to the peace movement?

Expand full comment

Or the fact that gain of function research is still going on unabated--

Expand full comment