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'Wow, it really worked ': 70s TV show causing worldwide panic today

theguardian.com

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Re: 'Wow, it really worked ': 70s TV show causing worldwide panic today

#31

Post by organsnyder »

technothrasher wrote: post #23
alberth wrote: post #18

Personal anecdote: I was in college when 9/11 happened. Back then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, radio was still a major part of daily life. iPods, iPhones, and streaming didn’t exist yet. Morning radio shows often did live prank calls to keep things entertaining. DJs would pretend to be the president or do some other ridiculous bit, and it was usually silly / harmless / funny. I remember driving to class that m…

I was at my desk here at work (yes, believe it or not, I still work at the same place I did 25 years ago) and as soon as it happened, all the major newspaper websites got overwhelmed and became unreachable. I ended up getting news from the Times of India's website because it was keeping up with the story but wasn't getting hit as hard as the others.

I remember trying to reach CNN.com on a school library computer. Eventually CNN put up a lightweight version that scaled better.

Re: 'Wow, it really worked ': 70s TV show causing worldwide panic today

#32

Post by jghn »

ryandrake wrote: post #24
jghn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the car listening to Howard Stern. Someone called in about it. They treated it as a joke at first. As it started playing out they realized that not only was it real but it was more than just a simple accident. THat's when I flipped over to the news radio station.

Once the event was underway, I recall Howard Stern providing rather good up-to-the-minute reporting about the event, by way of guests calling in. While the mainstream news was floundering around with stale info and generally not really knowing what was going on, you could get pretty decent information from the Stern show. Apart the occasional guest callers just calling in and shouting "baba booey," his coverage was q…

It did! Once I confirmed it was real I wound up bouncing between the two. Such a surreal experience

Re: 'Wow, it really worked ': 70s TV show causing worldwide panic today

#34

Post by chaseadam17 »

This article would be more convincing if it focused on debunking the conspiracy instead of spending all but one hand wavy paragraph presenting a new conspiracy.

The single debunking claim says there are 700k "US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce" so normal mortality rates should be higher.

Were these people all part of the normal workforce or a smaller category? Are those death rates total deaths or deaths under suspicious circumstances?

Anecdotally, Amy Eskridge went on a podcast and texted friends saying she was at risk and had no intention of killing herself before supposedly killing herself. Will McCasland and others disappeared under strange circumstances and Will was clearly not just part of a 700k person workforce, he was a general who directed a largely classified $4B annual research budget.

I'm not saying there is a broad conspiracy here but it's worth exploring. I miss real journalism. What a waste of an opportunity to write a good story.

Re: 'Wow, it really worked ': 70s TV show causing worldwide panic today

#36

Post by blincoln »

freediddy wrote: post #10

Investigating the disappearances or suspicious deaths of scientists with close ties to nuclear secrets isn't wrong. The problem is that there are real mysteries that are connected to a bunch of social media bullshit and more than half of the purported "mysterious disappearances" of people are people that aren't even connected to nuclear research. And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like…

> And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like Trump himself is being duped and is personally directing the investigators.

It sure sounds like Trump himself is being duped:

"On April 15, a question about the missing or dead individuals came up at a White House press briefing and by the next day Trump said he had met with advisers and the issue was being investigated. FBI Director Kash Patel reiterated the importance of looking for connections in these cases Sunday on Fox News. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is conducting its own investigation."

https://apnews.com/article/scientists-missing-dead-conspirac...

Re: 'Wow, it really worked ': 70s TV show causing worldwide panic today

#37

Post by somenameforme »

giantg2 wrote: post #28

The 4000 out of 700000 number doesn't seem quite right to me. That seems like maybe an average rate being applied to a cohort that doesn't match the average population. It would be more telling to compare deaths that were suspicious and missing persons numbers than all deaths. That said, I would assume the government would monitor statistics like this as part of standard counter intelligence operations so they could…

Oddly enough this exact topic came in another thread, and CDC mortality tables [1] are kind of eye opening for those who don't realize how brief life is. Take just the 25-44 year old bracket (which is probably conservative here given we're speaking of an older cohort) and the death rate is approximately 140/100k per year. For a sample of 700k people that'd be about 980 per year, around 1800 over 22 months.

Their estimate is more than twice that, but that is probably simply because of a higher age estimation. Mortality rates skyrocket upwards rapidly. At the 35-55 bracket we're already somewhere around 300/100k, which would be around 4k. And that age bracket is probably closer to reality than 25-44. Whatever the exact figure is going to be, 4k is probably a pretty decent ballpark.

And many of those deaths are going to be unusual, because pretty much all deaths at younger ages are unusual. A bit paradoxical given how 'regularly' it happens, when you look at the scale of society.

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/MortFinal2007_Worktable23r...

Re: 'Wow, it really worked ': 70s TV show causing worldwide panic today

#39

Post by romanhn »

saltcured wrote: post #27
technothrasher wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at my desk here at work (yes, believe it or not, I still work at the same place I did 25 years ago) and as soon as it happened, all the major newspaper websites got overwhelmed and became unreachable. I ended up getting news from the Times of India's website because it was keeping up with the story but wasn't getting hit as hard as the others.

I recall slashdot briefly becoming more like a scalable citizen journalist site in the middle of its usual news aggregation and performative memes.

Yup, I remember getting the updates from Slashdot while Yahoo was completely unusable due to overwhelming traffic.

Re: 'Wow, it really worked ': 70s TV show causing worldwide panic today

#40

Post by jimt1234 »

ryandrake wrote: post #24
jghn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the car listening to Howard Stern. Someone called in about it. They treated it as a joke at first. As it started playing out they realized that not only was it real but it was more than just a simple accident. THat's when I flipped over to the news radio station.

Once the event was underway, I recall Howard Stern providing rather good up-to-the-minute reporting about the event, by way of guests calling in. While the mainstream news was floundering around with stale info and generally not really knowing what was going on, you could get pretty decent information from the Stern show. Apart the occasional guest callers just calling in and shouting "baba booey," his coverage was q…

This was my experience, too. I learned about it on my commute to work, listing to Howard Stern. And, yeah, at first I thought it was another stupid skit.

One thing that impressed me about Stern's broadcast that day is he kept calling for calm. One quote I'll never forget: "Don't go around beating up cab drivers." Not sure why that made an impact on me.

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