On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a duty officer who was stationed in the nuclear early-warning system of the Soviet Union saw a big RED BOLD message all over the screen - 5 missiles launched from bases in the United States.
Petrov saved the world by not reporting them to his superiors, and instead dismissed them as a false alarm. This was a breach of his instructions, a dereliction of duty. The safe thing to do would have been to pass the responsibility on, to refer up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24280831
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the story did get into the press. Mr Petrov received several international awards. But he does not think of himself as a hero 😆
"That was my job", he says. "But they were lucky it was me on shift that night."
📣 The story has all attributes of a classic hoax: only one source, no witnesses, unnecessary visual details that make the story sound more trustworthy.
🧵 Context 1: September 26, 1983. On September 1 that year passenger Korean Boeing was shot over the Soviet Union due to false positive. Soviet military mistakenly identified the passenger jet as NATO spy airplane. The Boeing 747 airliner was en route from Anchorage to Seoul, but owing to a navigational mistake made by the crew, the airliner drifted from its original planned route and flew through Soviet prohibited airspace. The event caused a major international crisis. Some counter story was needed to rehabilitate the Soviet aerial defense forces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
🧵 Context 2: The story was unknown until the 1990s. The source of the story - a former Soviet aerial defense forces official. I've found the first version of the story in Russian. The Soviet military air defense was in the middle of upgrading to a new system. Soviet air defense military did not like the new system.
Long story short - the incident happened during the testing of the new system during one of the drills where the false positive was detected. In later versions of the story the drill part was omitted 😁
A BBC report in 1998 stated that Petrov had suffered a mental breakdown and quoted him as saying, "I was made a scapegoat."
The Bellwether Counties argument is frequently cited on Twitter as evidence of an anomaly in the 2020 elections. In 2020, Trump won the popular vote in bellwether counties but lost the election, whereas in 2016, he won both the popular vote in these counties and the election.
The argument states: there are 15-20 bellwether counties, and the candidate who wins the popular vote in these counties will win the General Election.
This concept is flawed since the winner of the General Elections is not decided by the popular vote but by the Electoral College.
Interestingly, there is only one county in the United States that has consistently voted for the winner of the presidential election since 1980: Clallam County, WA.
I have identified 16 bellwether counties that have allegedly predicted the winner. Among them are three counties in South Carolina (Calhoun, Colleton, and Darlington), two in Ohio (Ottawa and Wood), and two in New Mexico (Valencia and Hidalgo).
What do bellwether counties predict, and what do they ...
People think that the Wikipedia is not a reliable source because anyone can edit any article.
📣 Actually, Wikipedia is an excellent source for information. However, it is important to learn how to use it effectively. Here are a couple of examples of how to dig into a Wikipedia article:
- You can check the Wikipedia article in other languages and cross-check the information using Google Translate. The information on the same subject may vary significantly depending on the language in which it is written.
- You can go through the history of Wikipedia article edits and compare the information. You may discover that some essential information was removed by an editor.
I plan WIKI to be a series of articles on the Debunked, where debunking can be done solely using Wikipedia.
Russian Collusion was an alleged interference between the Trump campaign and Russia to interfere in 2016 elections. The Mueller report "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its ...
I've got some feedback on my post "Ancient Nazca Lines" where I speculate that Nazca lines geoglyphs (drawings) are not ancient but the creation of the 20th century.
https://debunked.locals.com/post/4353626/hh5-ancient-nazca-lines
Wikipedia for Nazca lines mentions that Pedro Cieza de León and Luis Monzón mentioned Nazca lines in the 1550s and 1580s 😁
Let's look up Pedro Cieza de León in Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Cieza_de_Le%C3%B3n
- Most parts of his book were published in the 19th and 20th century.
- Pedro Cieza de León mentions paths and not geoglyphs/drawings.
Luis Monzón's report from the 1580s was published in 1881. Luis mentions that he was told by the locals about "paths".
According to what was published Pedro Cieza de León and Luis Monzón did not see any geoglyphs even those that were visible from the ground 😌
For example the drawing of a cat was "discovered" only in the 21th century while it is visible from the ground (attached).
Both ...
