What to dose when "Chernobyl" happens near you...

I don't watch a lot of TV, but every once in a while I'll find a real gem of a series and I just enjoyed HBO's riveting dramatization of the Chernobyl disaster.

In it, the Soviet leadership refuses to evacuate the population of the area affected by Chernobyl, consigning many thousands (perhaps millions) of Soviet citizens to death by radiation poisoning. In the show, the nuclear scientists, are often popping little white pills, Potassium Iodide, to protect themselves from the radiation.

I don't know enough about nuclear power to say there is a real threat of another catastrophic nuclear reactor meltdown. Once upon a time, I got drunk in a bar in Panama with a nuclear engineer on vacation and he assured me that there was no way that a Fukushima or a Chernobyl-level event could occur again. I'd love to believe him but there's an article worth reading entitled 400 Chernobyls by an MIT engineer and author which suggests that nuclear power reactors present an existential threat to humanity and don't forget that there are over 14,000 nuclear warheads in the world, some in the hands of opposing nations which have great hate for each other. It seems naive to not worry about nuclear catastrophe.

Luckily, you can more or less Nuke-proof yourself, with several well-proven pharmaceuticals...

• Potassium Iodide - These Nuke Pills are Ultra High Dose for Emergency Nuclear Protection. They protect the thyroid gland from radiation and mitigate the resulting risk of thyroid cancer. The CDC recommends Potassium Iodide to men, women, and children to protect themselves from radiation emergencies and nuclear events. An adult would want to dose a single 125-milligram tab daily to protect themselves. The health-conscious will want to check and see if the background levels of radiation in their city is high, if you’re in a hot spot it would be smart to take a small dose of potassium iodide (200-300 micrograms) daily along with your vitamins.
• TIMUSAMIN® - This bioregulator fortifies the immune system against radiation damage as demonstrated in a study of 117 patients exposed to the long-term influence of ionizing irra­diation.
• ACTOVEGIN® - A five decades-old drug and cognitive enhancer that is recognized by researchers as a radiation protective agent.

If you enjoy history or political thrillers, check out HBO's Chernobyl and I urge you to practice long-term thinking and pick up a supply of these radiation-protective drugs. A supply of Potassium Iodide that would keep you alive for 3 weeks in a fall-out zone runs less than $20. You might be thinking...

OK but who knows when or if I'm going to need to nuke-proof myself? It could be in years, decades, next week or never!

The expiration dates on pharmaceuticals are very conservative estimates, the sapient Dr. Mercola makes a compelling case that if you needed a pharmaceutical you could probably use them up to a decade after you bought them. Obviously, it's preferable to use fresh stuff, but I keep a stash of Potassium Iodide in deep storage, I'd suggest you do the same. If I ever need an emergency nuclear protection dose, I'll have bigger things to worry about than expiration dates!

You might be thinking...

Jonathan I'm not a big conspiracy theorist. People have been crying the sky is falling since forever. I think everything is going to be OK...

Well, I'd like you to think about something...

Why You Can’t Fly on The Concorde

I just published a 5000-word review (here's the podcast version) of the book At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future.

Have you ever wondered why you can’t fly from New York to London on the supersonic Concorde? Why didn’t we go back to the moon or colonize Mars?
This book makes the case that it’s because we’ve hit peak intelligence as a civilization, we’re losing our wits and lack the smarts to accomplish anything really noteworthy.

This is a dense and pessimistic book that you'll need to do a lot of smart drugs to get through. Here's the TLDR:

The general intelligence of western civilization is declining precipitously.

1. Mostly for the same reasons as portrayed in the first few minutes of the movie Idiocracy.
2. Wealth, resources, and abundance discourage the most intelligent from reproducing.
3. Civilizations (Rome, China, "Golden age" Islam) go through cycles of rising and declining intelligence which reflect in the waning of civilization. Western civilization is now in decline.

If it seems like everything - music, art, politics, culture - is getting stupider, it's because of declining general intelligence. It's a black pilling message, but in my conclusion, there's a white pill...

But ultimately, we don't need transhumanism to save us from our own Idiocracy, this problem of declining intelligence could be fixed culturally. 

We understand the current intelligence collapse so well, that we probably won't face a thousand year dark age like after the fall of the Roman empire. Things happen very fast now. You may have the opportunity to play a part in shaping a new cultural order that cultivates intelligence. If we had a culture that permanently banished the dysgenic welfare state and strongly encouraged young people to...

• Get educated.
• Be healthy and moral.
• Have children early and often, forming a family with a virtuous partner in their 20's.

It would not be very many generations before geniuses solved some of the most intractable problems our species currently faces and we began to turn our collective gaze towards impregnating the other planets in our solar system with human brilliance.

The message of At Our Wits’ End asseverates the realness of the looming threat of the next Chernobyl. If our civilization isn't even smart enough to keep the Notre Dame cathedral from catching on fire what hope is there that we'll manage to avoid nuclear catastrophe in this world going mad?

Radioprotectively yours,

Jonathan Roseland