For decades, Hollywood has provided plenty of examples of psychopaths at the top of the corporate ladder, but a growing body of research is revealing the truth is similar to fiction
We found one in five [people were] found to have clinically elevated levels of psychopathy.
Tool to screen for psychopaths
So much sweetness – (bitterness)
the city’s been anesthetized;
a skinny boy, who barely
takes up space on earth,
and a dog,
and I, a soldier in an unseen war,
and a river I love.The lindens bloom
~ Adam Zagajewski
My sister-in-law Magda was pregnant during the Chernobyl incident. My nephew Tomas was born deaf and blind and passed away at the age of 24. Tomas gave my grandparents many many soulful family moments despite his disabilities - he was helpful around the carpetner's workshop with his detkom Jozom and creative in the kitchen with babickou Mariou who was a cook at the local school canteen.... Real stories are always stranger than fiction... It is not easy to explain some aspects of complexity of this life to all west corner of the Latitude ... Tomas is missed by his brothers Lukas and Marcel and his lovely sister Aga - who was named after her auntie - Aga Junior was born a year and a day after her auntie died....
In 1986, the Soviet Union was struck by disaster as the
core of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. The surrounding areas
became unsafe for humans due to the radioactive contamination, and
officials created the “Chernobyl Exclusion Zone,” what is now a 1,000
square mile (2,600 km^2) area where, per Wikipedia, “fallout is highest.” With
rare exception, people have been barred from the Zone since -- the perils
of prolonged exposure to areas of high radiation aren’t well known, but
they probably are probably best avoided. As a result, for the last thirty
years, few humans have been in the area.
But animals? They’re harder to keep out. And sometimes, this happens.
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That looks like a little shark, maybe -- but it's not.
Even though it's more than two meters (nearly seven feet) long, rest
assured: it's a catfish. A really, really big catfish.
The image above is a screenshot from this YouTube video and, if you watch it for
long enough, you'll see a bunch of these huge catfish swimming around in
what was formerly a cooling pool for the nuclear plant. Those pools
were affected by the Chernobyl disaster, so yes, the fish and many other
similarly big catfish have been subject to higher than typical radiation
levels. But -- despite what many reports have implied -- they aren't
mutants. In fact, they're probably quite healthy.
The monster fish are a species known as “wels catfish,” a rather common
type native to Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. As Wikipedia notes, they’re larger than the catfish that
others many be familiar with, although hardly as big as the monstrous one
seen above -- they typically grow to be about five feet (1.5m) long and
weigh about 40 lb (17 kg).
The one above is bigger, of course -- about 33% larger -- but radiation
almost certainly isn’t the cause. First, the pools probably aren't
all that radioactive. As one writer notes, a typical airplane flight exposes a
person to about four times the radiation that the fish are being exposed
to. And while the fish are exposed to these higher levels around the
clock, typically, mutations and radiation poisoning would be more likely
to make the fish weaker, not larger.
So what’s going on? Most likely, the cause for the giant catfish isn’t
something that's in
the Zone but rather, something that isn’t:
predators.
By fencing off the 1,000 square mile area, the authorities may have kept
people away from the radiation, but the rest of the animal kingdom hasn't
been as cooperative. Many different species have remained in the area or
entered since, as National Geographic notes, the dearth of people in the Zone
has, unintentionally, turned the area into one of the world’s largest
wildlife preserves. "Without people hunting them or ruining their
habitat," Nat Geo explains, "wildlife is thriving despite high
radiation levels."
For the catfish, we can go even one step further. As EarthThough News explains, "catfish are both active
predators and scavengers, known to feed on fish, amphibians, worms, birds
and even small mammals. In fact, the fish will eat just about anything –
alive or dead – that can fit into their very large mouths, and here at
Chernobyl, they have virtually no competition for food."
No predators, no competition for food -- that adds up. The net result is
huge fish which aren't mutants -- they're just the beneficiaries of a
natural disaster, and our species' collective resolve to not return to
the site of that disaster.
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Bonus fact: What does the Chernobyl exclusion zone look like today?
It's hard, but not impossible, to get a permit to look around. But if you
want to see for yourself without having to go through those steps, here are some photos from someone who did
it for you. As the author notes, "it will take centuries before
anything [at the disaster site] can safely be destroyed," due to the
contamination. As a result, the area is frozen in time, but with three
decades of natural decay.
From the Archives: Nuclear Teeth: How baby teeth helped show
the harm of nuclear fallout.
Related: "Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the
World's Worst Nuclear Disaster" by Andrew Leatherbarrow.
4.4 stars on 46 reviews and relatively new (released in April of this
year).
Greta Van Susteren is
unemployed but unbowed and taking to Facebook. She's right when it comes to the
merits of her argument and notable in choosing her venue.
The former longtime Fox
News host, who split amid the Roger Ailes sex harassment mess, posted a video expressing outrage with President Obama
and the Justice Department for not indicting Wells Fargo executives for the
outrageous scamming of consumers that resulted in regulatory fines of $185
million. Employees opened about 1.5 million bank accounts and applied for
565,000 credit cards not approved by customers. (USA Today)
"OK, you have every
right to be enraged," she says in a home video whose modest production
values resemble those of celebrity leaker Edward Snowden's early Hong Kong
Period. "I am. It just never stops. And you and every other American gets
cheated. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Obama administration is once
again letting you down. It happens again and again. And it's disgraceful. It's
actually indecent."
Instead of being indicted,
or even fired, the executive who ran the guilty division will retire with $124
million in stock, options and shares in the company. As Nell Minow, a prominent
corporate governance expert, put it to me, "This is truly an outrage. It’s
the exact same problem that got Sears Auto Repair and the subprime derivatives
into trouble: paying people for the quantity of transactions and not the
quality. The CEO should be fired, and the board members on the risk and
compensation committees should resign."
Then there's Van Susteren's
new vehicle for opining and potentially luring a chunk of her old audience (in
the first 13 hours the video was up, she got 720,000 views). As Carol Fowler, a
former news director at two major Chicago TV stations and now a consultant on
branding and social media, says, "Using Facebook to stay connected and in
view on news of the day makes perfect sense for Greta — or anyone else who
loses their traditional stage. Smart."
"And in Greta's case,
she clearly worked hard in her role at Fox News to build a Facebook (and
Twitter) following, so why not? No one expects polish in the social space, so
lacking a teleprompter is not a big deal. Go Greta!"
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