Episode 134: The China Syndrome, Predictive Programming, and Three Mile Island

1979's The China Syndrome is one of the best examples of predictive programming we have, IMO. Twelve days later, the incident at Three Mile Island occurred very similarly to the disaster in the film. 

Today, due to the influx of these damn data centers, we're told nuclear power for the electrical grid is basically the only option.

'Twas ever thus. 

⚠️ Spoilers lie ahead.

Links:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/19601219

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078966/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_Nuclear_Generating_Station#Reopening_and_Microsoft_partnership

https://web.archive.org/web/20210102203851/https://www.nytimes.com/1979/03/18/archives/nuclear-experts-debate-the-china-syndrome-but-does-it-satisfy-the.html

https://www.ans.org/news/article-3812/elon-musk-shutting-down-nuclear-plants-is-total-madness/

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/02/nx-s1-5694656/jared-kushner-new-gaza-plan

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses the film The China Syndrome and its relevance to the 1979 Three Mile Island incident. She highlights the film's release coinciding with the real-life event, suggesting predictive programming. Causey critiques the push for nuclear power, data centers, and smelters, linking it to environmental degradation and corporate interests. She mentions the disappearance of local media and the challenges in finding journalists to discuss media layoffs. Causey also references the planned reopening of Three Mile Island in 2028, funded by a $1 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy, and criticizes the broader agenda behind these developments.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

China Syndrome, predictive programming, Three Mile Island, nuclear power, environmental impact, local media, corporate cover-ups, data centers, national security, conservation, public perception, nuclear accident, corporate interests, media layoffs, industrial revolution.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about the China Syndrome, predictive programming, and Three Mile Island. For my money, the China Syndrome is one of the best examples of predictive programming that we have, mostly because the gap between the movie coming out and the incident at Three Mile Island was only a matter of days, and it gave various governments and talking heads the opportunity to say, "That's just a movie. You, you guys, you environmentalists, are just being a bunch of nitwits-that was a movie. That's only fiction, but that's one facet of how predictive programming works. The power structure gets to tell us that only happened in a movie, that only happened in a book or a music video. That was fake. This is real. I promise, at some point, you'll have a list of things that I still need to get to. I promise at some point I will talk about the book Simulacra and Simulacrum, because one of the arguments of that book is this idea of well, certain things are fake, but I live in the real world, like the notion of Disneyland. Somebody goes to Disneyland and the kids interact with humans in these costumes of Mickey and Minnie, and they ride the rides and they eat the food, and then they go home. The idea is you're having this fake curated experience inside Disneyland, but once you get out to the parking lot and then you go home and you drive through L.A. or Hollywood, you're back in the real world, and it's like right, sure, because we all know that La La Land and Hollywood are the real world, of course. But this is part of how predictive programming works: is being able to say that that's fake. That only happened in fiction. You can't tell the difference. And unfortunately, some people go right along with that. And I think it's also extremely timely for us to talk about this, even though the film came out in the 70s, I think it's timely for us to talk about this because it's like here we are again. They're getting ready to fire up Three Mile Island again, and we're told that there's this big push. We need to have smelters. We need to have nuclear power plants. Like we're we're generating more demand, which it's not really us anyway. It's the fucking data centers. We're generating so much need for electricity that nuclear is going to be the only option for us. And if you oppose that, you're just backward. You're some kind of ignorant hillbilly who doesn't know better. But yet the hyper elites telling us that we quote unquote need all of these things-they're not exactly volunteering to live next to a data center, a smelter, or a nuclear power plant. We're just stuck in this, but it's important for national security, you guys. America, we have to stay on top. And I'm like, what's happening to the land? I think I talked about this on the air before, but it was like I saw a video on the news. Apparently, there used to be like a ticketing system, you know, a wait kind of list for people to go in and out of the national parks to avoid overcrowding, but that's been done away with. And somebody showed a video of their vacation at Yosemite, and it was a sea of people. There was absolutely nothing about that that looked enjoyable to me. It looked like a throng. It looked like fucking World War Z happening at Yosemite, and I was like, not for a million bucks, man. But the idea of conservation, preservation-that some land should simply be left alone for its own sake-is rapidly disappearing, and I think we need to blow the whistle on that. I also think, ironically, this ties into the disappearance of local media. On the face of it, it may seem unrelated, but it isn't. And this also is part of the China syndrome, because we have a TV crew, a TV crew that's trying to expose what's going on at this plant, and they play an integral role in what's happening, and I just think local news disappearing is not a coincidence to all of this.

Earlier this month, on con-sara-cy theories Way After Dark, I published an episode to discuss why I think that local media is being taken away from us and and how I think it's part of a bigger, broader agenda, and I really wanted to find specifically a television journalist who's been caught up in the recent layoffs, the mergers, the acquisitions, etc. I wanted somebody who has lived it in real time to come on the broadcast and tell us what it's like. What did they experience? It would be. With me, if they wanted to remain anonymous, if the condition was, don't say my name, don't give my location other than saying I'm in the United States, and don't say what TV station it was on, even if I had to distort the voice, that would be fine. I just really wanted somebody to come on. When I put the request out, the answers that I got made no sense. It was people that that absolutely made no sense whatsoever to the brief, and I couldn't get anybody. Like I had a few looky loos who were like, "I'm just gonna see if anybody pops up their head like a prairie dog or a gopher to talk to this lady. I mean, I don't mind spying and looking, but I'm not gonna say anything, and I have a couple of theories about that. I could be wrong. Full Dennis Miller disclaimer here. This is just my opinion, just some theorizing, and I could be wrong. But I think you have one part of it is people signing effectively gag orders whenever they get their severance package, and to me, this is a situation where two things can be true at one time. I can be disgusted by it, and I can also understand it and be sympathetic to it at the same time. Even though that seems contradictory, it feels true to me. I get it. People need money. If they have a family to feed, they're not worrying about going on a podcast and doing an expose, they're thinking about the here and the now, and the immediate term. They're not thinking about I want to be a servant of truth and get the message out about what really happened to me. They're thinking about I just want to get this check, and it's easier for me to take the check as hush money and then shut the fuck up. I think that's one part of it. I think the other part of it is people still yet living in denial about what's going on. That jobs are going away and they're not coming back. Full stop. You still have a large cadre of people that don't want to believe that that's true, and I understand it. I have sympathy for it, and at the same time, I'm disgusted by it because if you don't wake the fuck up, you're going to get steamrolled. To me, it reminds me of a plow horse. Imagine if a plow horse gets laid off because the farmer buys a tractor and implements, and the farmer's like, "Oh my God, the tractor and the implements are so much more convenient. Everything goes so much faster. There's a greater range of things I can do with this equipment, and the plow horse is sitting there going, "Yeah, but I'm still in the industry. I've been in the plow horsing industry for the past 30 years, and I don't want to burn any bridges. I don't want to go on a podcast and blow the whistle because somebody might hear, and then I can't get another job as a plow horse, and I'm convinced that somehow people are still going to double team oxen and use plow horses instead of tractors. We've already had Klaus Schwab tell us this is the fourth industrial revolution. You can say, okay, well he's a crackpot. The the WEF is full of crackpots. Lord Elon is a crackpot. They're all just telling us a bunch of lies. I mean, whatever. That's certainly your choice. But it seems to me, even just by simple power of observation, that there are a shitload of jobs that are going away and they're not coming back.

So to me, the idea of I'm going to hide in the shadows and take my check, and then hope that maybe I can get another television reporting job instead of blowing the whistle on what's actually happening, you do you, boo. But I don't predict a great outcome there. So, nevertheless, let us have our frosty beverage of choice. Spoilers will be involved in this episode in order for me to talk about the China syndrome and then how is predictive programming, and and what happened at Three Mile Island? I do have to spoil the film. If for some reason you have not seen it and you want to, please go check it out. Download this episode, bookmark it, and come back to it later. If you stick around, I assume spoilers are fine with you. So we will select those frosty beverages and saddle up and take this ride.

Sara's award-winning biography, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjold, and her latest release, Simply Dag: The Public Man in a Private and Dangerous Office, are available on Amazon. The Simply Dag audiobook can be found along with other cool merch on her storefront at Sara Causey dot Shop, and now back to the show. 

The China Syndrome was released in 1979, which will become highly relevant to the overall story here. On the promotional poster, it reads: "Today, only a handful of people know what it means. Soon, you will know. Jane Fonda plays this kind of late 70s LA area roving reporter named Kimberly Wells, and she wants more. They depict the kind of sexism that women have had to deal with in the news, where it's like we want you to do puff pieces and fluffy throwaway stories. She wants to do things that are serious and of consequence. But it's kind of like the station wants to pigeonhole her into working on silliness. Go cover a local party. Go cover a local kitten that gets stuck in a tree. That kind of thing. So she has the opportunity, along with her cameraman Richard Adams, who is played by Michael Douglas. Incidentally, in case you're curious about some more trivia, Michael Douglas was also the producer of this film, so she goes with her cameraman Richard to this Ventana nuclear power plant that's just outside L.A. and they also take a sound man named Hector, which Hector will also become significant to the story too, and they witness the plant as they're taking this kind of like, hey, we're out here doing this promotional kind of tour, and we've got camera and we've got sound. They witness a turbine trip, and then there's a corresponding scram, which is an emergency shutdown. And there's a graphic that comes on screen to explain to us as lay people, like how does a nuclear power plant actually work? And the gist of it is this: nuclear power plants generate electricity by using heat from splitting uranium atoms. This is a process called nuclear fission, and that turns water into high-pressure steam. The steam spins a large turbine connected to an electrical generator, and this produces carbon-free power. So the process, the core process, nuclear fission, uranium fuel. Small pellets of enriched uranium are sealed inside long metal fuel rods grouped within the reactor core, splitting atoms, free neutrons strike uranium-235 atoms, causing them to split. There's a chain reaction. Each split releases heat, radiation, and extra neutrons that trigger more atoms to split. Control rods, operators insert or withdraw rods made of neutron-absorbing materials like boron to speed up, slow down, or stop the reaction, and the heat gets turned into electricity. There's a primary loop: water pumped through the reactor core absorbs intense heat without boiling because it is kept under extreme pressure. There's a secondary loop or steam generation. This hot pressurized water flows past a separate water supply in a steam generator, causing that secondary water to boil into steam. The expanding steam rushes past a turbine's blades and forces them to spin. The mechanical rotation drives a generator to create electricity. Exhaust steam is cooled back into liquid water via a third water loop connected to a cooling tower or a nearby water source, then recycled back to repeat the cycle again. So, what exactly is the turbine trip that they witness? A turbine trip is the automatic safety shutdown of a power generation turbine due to unexpected events, and then due to the number of issues that may cause a trip, they are relatively common events, common in both coal and nuclear power generation. The emergency shutdown or scram that they witness is an emergency shutdown of the nuclear reactor effected by terminating the fission reaction, it's also the name that's given to the manually operated kill switch that initiates the shutdown. The shift supervisor is a man named Jack Goodell, and Goodell is played by Jack Lemmon. He notices, like he's got a cup of coffee sitting there on this table, and he notices like ripples and vibration in the liquid of the coffee, and it's sort of this like oh shit moment. You know, it's like in Jaws, dun dun dun dun dun dun. You know when you hear that music that the shark is getting ready to show up. So Goodell checks a gage, and it says that there are high water levels. So, because of this gage saying that the water levels had gone high, Goodell starts to remove water from the core, but the gage remains high, and the operators open more valves to dump water.

Another operator notices that there's another gage that says now there are low water levels, so Goodell taps the first gage, which unsticks and then it drops to show that actually it had been mismeasuring, and the levels are very low. So this is another oh shit moment. So the crew then urgently tries to pump water back inside, and then they have this like, okay. We think that the reactor is back under control. The powers that be inside this facility are not aware that Richard Adams has been filming. He's like done the whole pantomime of, oh yes, I shut the camera off. Don't worry about it. And he places the camera down by his side, like I'm not even operating it. Look, I'm totally innocent here, but really he's been filming the entire thing. So when they get back to the station, Kimberly is excited about what they have, as any reporter would be, but her supervisor and then also like the station manager that's above all of them puts the kibosh on it. It's like we we will put this film in the vault, but for security reasons, we're not going to be able to broadcast it on the air. So Kimberly's frustrated, and then also so is Richard, the cameraman. He gets into the vault and steals the footage back, and he shows it to some experts. And this is where we get the titular reference to the China syndrome. He's talking to this scientist who talks about the what if a nuclear accident happened that was really a meltdown, and it's called the China syndrome because the idea is a hot reactor core would melt right through the bottom of the plant itself, and then it just keeps going further and further down into the earth. The idea is, it's kind of like the old jokes about he tunneled his way all the way to China. The idea is like it would just keep melting and melting, and it would just go all the way through the planet and around to the other side to China. There is an inspection of the plant before it goes back online, and Goodell discovers a puddle of radioactive water that has leached out from a pump, and he blows the whistle on it and says, "I think that we need to delay the restart. But the superintendent of the plant doesn't want something like possible radioactive water to stand in the way. Goodell also finds a series of radiographs that supposedly verify the welds on a leaking pump, but he notices that the radiographs are identical. So what that means is the contractor who took the radiographs to verify that all of the weld seams were in working order just kept submitting the same picture over and over again. I do plan to record an episode or two about Karen Silkwood. You may remember if you know anything about her story or if you saw the movie from back in like the early '80s, a doctored X-ray picture is something else that factors into that story as well. So Goodell takes the evidence of the doctored radiographs to the plant superintendent, and he just is like, "Hey, this is ridiculous. If we were to try to get a brand new set, a clean set of radiographs, it would cost millions of dollars. So we're just not going to do it. It was very much like sit down, shut up, know your place. So Goodell confronts a man named Royce, who's an employee of Foster Sullivan, and Foster Sullivan built the plant originally, and it was this man Royce who signed off on the radiographs to begin with. So it's like he's trying to go through a sort of chain of command and blow the whistle on this. Goodell threatens that he will go to the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but then Royce in turn threatens him, and then later, some men in a car who are from Foster Sullivan park outside his house in this kind of menacing "we're watching you" sort of way. Kimberly Wells and Richard Adams go to see Goodell at his home, and he tells them what he's concerned about. So then Kimberly and Richard say like there are going to be NRC hearings in regards to Foster Sullivan's plans to build yet another nuclear plant, and we think you should show up and talk about what you've seen.

We need to talk about what happened, and then we also need to talk about this new evidence of the doctored radiographs. So Goodell agrees that he will go and do this, and then he sends Hector Salas, the guy who had been the sound man earlier. He sends him to go and get the the set of fake radiographs to take to the hearings. But in the process of him trying to pick up this file, and there's all this cloak and dagger of like, okay, I'm going to leave the files at a secret location, and then you show up at a prescribed time and get them at the secret location. You know, there's all this movie cloak and dagger, but even though they think they're covering their tracks, they're not because Salas's car is run off the road and he's injured but not killed, and the radiographs are taken after the accident. Goodell is then chased outside his home by the men who were parked out in a car spying on him. He drives back to the plant, and he finds that the reactor is being brought back up to its full power. He gets a boomstick from a security guard and forces everybody out. Has like. A meltdown of his own, no pun intended, and his friend and coworker Ted Spindler, who's played by Wilford Brimley, he gets him in there, and it's like Goodell says the only way that you can massage me out of this situation is if Kimberly Wells shows up and I get to say what I need to say on live television unimpeded. So in order to cool the situation down to try to avoid a shoot 'em up scenario, the managers at the plant say, "Okay, we will allow you to do this live interview. We will find Kimberly, but really all they're doing is just kind of shining him on because they want to get in a SWAT team. Kimberly gets there, and within just a matter of minutes of interviewing Goodell, the people in the plant deliberately cause another emergency shutdown. It causes an obvious distraction, and they also get the SWAT team to like cut the doors up and force their way in. The cable to the television broadcast is cut, and then Goodell is pop popped. But before he dies, he feels the unusual vibration again, and so the scram that happens is only brought under control by the automatic systems that the plant had put in place. And there are some bits of damage as this pump malfunctions. So then there's a big press conference outside the plant, and the people in charge are like, "Well, he was a drinker, he was emotionally deranged, he was having a lot of personal problems. They try to get Ted Spindler to affirm these allegations that Goodell was just crazy, but he finally decides to do the right thing and say no, he wasn't a drunk and he wasn't crazy. He wouldn't have done the things that he did unless something was seriously wrong. So we need to look at what we're doing here, Kimberly Wells concludes the report, and then we see as the news broadcast punts over into a commercial for microwaves. Jane Fonda was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress, Jack Lemmon for Best Actor. At the BAFTAs, Jack Lemmon won for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Jane Fonda won for Best Actress in a Leading Role. The film was nominated for a Palme D'or at the Cannes Film Festival, and then Jack Lemmon won at Cannes for the Best Actor. Now let's pivot for a moment to what happened at Three Mile Island. So in March of 1979, write like. not even two weeks after the China syndrome has hit theaters, Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania has the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history. So let's take a look at it in simple terms. Number one, the cooling system broke. A nuclear reactor relies on water constantly flowing through it to keep that hot radioactive core cooled down. Early in the morning, an equipment malfunction caused the main water pumps to stop working. Two, a valve got stuck in the open position to relieve built-up pressure. An automatic valve opened. It was supposed to close once the pressure dropped, but it got stuck. Water, which is the reactor's cooling system, started to drain out.

Three, a misleading sensor misled the operators, so the computer screen showed that the valve was closed when actually it was stuck in the open position. So the plant operators thought the system had too much water, so they manually turned down the emergency cooling water. Now stop me when this sounds familiar, because didn't we just fucking talk about this vis-a-vis the China syndrome? Number four, the core melted. Without enough of that cooling water, the nuclear fuel rods became overheated, superheated. The metal covering the fuel, so like the the metal covering over the fuel began to react with steam and melt, and it exposed radioactive material inside the reactor building. Five radiation was contained, so we're told, radiation leaked into the atmosphere, but we are told officially that the amounts were very small. The massive, thick concrete containment structure surrounding the reactor worked as designed. We're told and trapped almost all of the dangerous material inside. Things that make you say, "Hmm." So let's think about this. The movie gets released on March 16, 1969. 12 days later, on March 28th, so we're not even out of the same month. 12 days later, on March 28, 1979, the true life accident at Three Mile Island happens, and we're told it's just uncanny, spooky timing. In an interview, Michael Douglas used the term "eerie. It's just an eerie feeling that we release this picture, and then not even two weeks later, there's the problem at Three Mile Island. Hmm. Yeah. What an interesting coincidence. So let's take a look at the similarities. Number one, there's a hidden stuck open valve in both. In the movie, a water level valve that gets stuck open misleads the people in in the control room, and they think the reactor core is full of water when it is actually losing water. At Three Mile Island. A relief valve got stuck open, and the misleading signal led the operators to believe that the system was overly full, and that caused them to shut off the emergency cooling water. Two operator misinterpretation. In the film, the control room operators trust their faulty gages, rather than the true physical state of the reactor, and they make decisions that worsen the situation. At Three Mile Island, operators misread instrument panels and manually turned off the emergency high-pressure injection water pumps, and this directly caused the reactor to overheat and partially melt. Fear of the China syndrome or a core meltdown that can be our sort of number three. In the film, a scientist explains that if a core meltdown occurred, the superheated nuclear material could melt right through to the bottom of the plant and go quote all the way to China. At Three Mile Island, the reactor core didn't melt through the concrete base. We're told, but about 50 percent of the core did melt, and this very much did create a real-life threat of a total meltdown before operators regained control. Point number four: near exact dialog that was realized in the film. A character remarks that a nuclear accident could render an area quote the size of the state of Pennsylvania uninhabitable. They just it's so flagrant. But then at Three Mile Island, the accident happens In Pennsylvania, people panic, and which anybody would, and there are evacuation warnings, particularly for pregnant women and young children. Last but not least, corporate cover-ups and mechanical flaws. That can be our number five. In the film, the plant owners try to cover up safety violations and downplay the danger to avoid financial ruin. 'Twas ever thus. Irl, we can say that officially. All right, let me let me let me hedge my bets here a little bit. We can say that officially, there wasn't any intentional sabotage plot like what we see in the film. Okay, we can say that the company operating TMI Met Ed was heavily criticized for giving confused, overly optimistic, and contradictory reports to the public and the media during the first few days of the crisis. So here's the thing: If you think that predictive programming is something that went on way back when, oh, maybe 50 years ago they were still doing that kind of stuff, I would beg to differ. It gives a built-in excuse. That's just something from a book. That's just something from TV. That's just something from a movie, you can't take it seriously.

Now I want to take a second and go to the Wikipedia page for Three Mile Island, under the tab Reopening and Microsoft Partnership. On September 20, 2024, citing a resurgence in the need for nuclear-generated carbon-free electricity, Constellation Energy announced plans to reopen Three Mile Island Unit One in 2028. It will be renamed the Christopher M. Crane Clean Energy Center in honor of former Exelon Corporation CEO Chris Crane. Crane, who started his career in nuclear energy as a reactor operator with ComEd, retired from Exelon in December 2022 and died on April 13, 2024. As part of this plan, Microsoft entered into a 20-year agreement to purchase power from the facility once it resumes operation, aiming to support the energy demands of its expanding data centers. Here we go; it's all connected. Constellation Energy. Will invest 1.6 billion dollars into the plant's upgrades pending regulatory approval, which undoubtedly they'll get. When TMI-1 was shut down in 2019, safety diesel fuel tanks were drilled into and filled with concrete to eliminate chances of leaks into the environment. Transformers had their oil drained and were then scrapped as Exelon saw little chance for reopening. Thus, replacement transformers for the reopening of TMI-1 cost 100 million dollars in 2025. The steam generators were drained and exposed to air during decommissioning, but were found to be in good condition during inspections in 2025. During inspections, Constellation found no parts that would require so much time to have to push back the schedule opening past 2028. Since the nuclear facility was deemed to be in excellent condition, there is a chance it could reopen a year early in 2027. In November of 2025, the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy announced it would loan $1 billion to Constellation Energy to assist in the in the project of reopening Unit One, it's all fucking connected. Do they still do predictive programming? Of course they do. Of course they will tell you and give you scenarios ahead of time, and then they'll trot out their idiots and bots and shills to be like, "We see the movie. This is fake. Is this fake? And then look at all of this. Look, look at all of this. $1 billion coming from the U.S. Department of Energy. Microsoft is involved. Oh, because we have to expand data centers. Why do we suddenly have this need for as much space in the U.S. as possible, to be taken up with data centers, nuclear plants, and smelters. In a New York Times article titled "Nuclear Experts Debate the China Syndrome, dated March 18, 1979, we find John Taylor, an executive of Westinghouse, which makes reactors, calls the film an overall character pop pop of an entire industry. Lord Elon has been quoted as saying, "Shutting down nuclear plants is total madness. So look, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Here we are; we just keep going round and round and round again. It's kind of like you know I recorded another episode on conspiracy theories way after dark about how Lord Elon says that if we give it a decade, we're not even going to need money anymore. I mean, not him. Obviously, he doesn't. He's he's not going to go first and give up his wallet. But those of us who are peons and plebs, we won't even need currency anymore. Money will just be outdated and outmoded. There's this push for nuclear power and data centers and smelters and just these kinds of chemical wastelands that rape the earth. In my opinion, okay, that's just my opinion. All, all that all that I'm doing is stating an opinion about that. I'm not passing that off as fact. That's just my opinion. Would I want to live next to all that stuff? No, shit, no. I think that, you know, especially coming on the the heels of my episode about Silent Running, where it's like you have these geodesic domes out in space, and that's the last of the forest. It's almost like we have the China syndrome. I should have I should have watched them in a different order. I probably should have gone China syndrome first and then silent running because it's almost like the one makes a lot of sense following the other. We have to leave something untouched.

There has to be space for plants and animals that also occupy the earth, and I just I fail to see the need for data centers everywhere, nuclear power plants all over the place, aluminum smelters, and just we can't even say because the the thing of it is I don't want to get partisan because I find that really ridiculous. We can't say like it's just the orange man. He's he's the puppet that's in there right now. He seems to be a very agreeable puppet. I will say that, but he's a puppet nevertheless. The powers that be that really pull the strings are trying to make sure that the country just turns into a massive dumping ground. Instead of really protecting things that are precious that that make life worthwhile, it's just everything is industry and brinkmanship, and frankly, it makes me sick. So we have several things going on here at once. We have the potential danger that these types of plants represent. You know, you're told that if you disagree with nuclear power, if you're a NIMBY type that doesn't want it in your backyard, then you must be a shill for the fossil fuel industry, or you must be an uneducated, unwashed hippie. Then we also have the. Programming aspect of all of it, where we're telegraphed what's going to happen before it happens, and then when it happens, you're told like, well, but that's just fiction. The way that it played out in the cinema or the way that it played out in a popular novel is not the way that you should look at this real life event because if you do, then you're a moron. You have the guy from Westinghouse saying, "Well, this is basically just besmirching an entire industry. It's just Hollywood besmirching an entire industry to make money. You have Lord Elon saying that shutting down nuclear plants is total madness. 'Twas ever thus. We get this Cold War brinkmanship style of it's us versus them shoved down our throats, except we don't even have the courtesy of some clear narrative anymore. Back then, it was East versus West, capitalism versus communism, the Americans versus the Soviets. Now all of the lines are blurred, and it's like we have to do this because someone else is going to jump ahead of us. Like who, and in what context? We don't even understand. Which a lot of that obfuscation also comes from being in perma wars all the time, where one war bleeds into another, bleeds into another, and we don't even know what's going on anymore. We don't know which end is up, like the mess with Russia and the Ukraine that was everywhere for a while, and all the armchair quarterbacks had to flash their Ukrainian flags, and it's like, do you even know what's going on over there now? Do you care, or have you moved on to the latest thing? The war in Iran wasn't supposed to be like Poppy Bush telling us, "Read my lips, no new taxes. Wasn't the Orange Man supposed to be like, "No new wars" Well, Poppy broke his word and signed an omnibus bill that introduced new taxes, and then here we are in another goddamn perma war. Which, what is it even about? What what's what's the frequency, Kenneth? What is this shit even about? You have Jared Kushner, who is the orange man's son-in-law, saying that he wants to put together a new Gaza with loft-style apartments, floor-to-ceiling windows, oil and gas rigs, industrial and commercial zones, neighborhoods surrounded by parks. He goes off to the fucking WEF in Davos in January of this year and tells the Board of Peace, all about this new Gaza and the timeline for it. All I can think of is mr. McFisto, Bono's character from like the early '90s, where he says, "People of the Soviet Union, I've given you capitalism, so now you can all dream of being as wealthy and glamorous as me.

Deep, heavy existential sigh. The China syndrome, I believe, is definitely worth your time, particularly since there's going to be a reopening of Three Mile Island most likely next year. I think it behooves you to just stay aware of what's going on. Don't bury your head in the sand about this, and come to your own conclusions. Don't don't listen to me either. Do the research for yourself. Make up your own mind. If living around a situation like this, or a data center, or a smelter, whatever it is that they're trying to shove down your throat, figure out if it's something that you really want to live next to or not. In the meantime, stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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