*Guitar riff*

MAKO: Warning. This show contains adult themes and language, including buttplugs.

SQEAKY: Dysevidentia is an inability to reliably process evidence and this is a podcast all about it. This episode was released on March 14th, 2022, and we are discussing dysevidentia because it is clear millions of warhawks are suffering from it.

MAKO: I am Mako.

SQEAKY: And I am Sqeaky.

MAKO: We discuss logic and evidence because everyone believes the rumor mill once in a while.

SQEAKY: You can support us by becoming a Patron at patreon.com/dysevidentia. If you donated all of your money to airbnb.org, CARE, Convoy of Hope, Doctors Without Borders, International Medical Corps, or another charity helping fleeing Ukranians alphabetically after the letter “I”, you can still help us by liking, subscribing, and leaving a review.

SOURCE [1:04] Charities Helping Refugees Fleeing Ukraine - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-ukraine-refugees-donations-charity/

MAKO: If you have a paper you have written or a small business to plug, let us know.

SQEAKY: Today we are going to discuss misinformation in a modern war.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: Today we are going to discuss minfer- minfer…

MAKO: Minfer.

SQEAKY: Minferismation.

MAKO: That’s not a word.

SQEAKY: Neither is dysevidentia.

MAKO: Hey, we’re making it one.

*Guitar riff*

META [1:28]

SQEAKY: It’s been another two weeks. We did pretty good last episode but one of our listeners up in the Discord server pointed out that we made a baseless claim. We talked it out and we’re not even sure if it’s wrong. But I claimed that most Americans think Jesus is white.

MAKO: Seems- Okay. Within my experience that is the mandatory caveat here, that seems largely reasonable.

SQEAKY: I think I’ve been to a few more places than you maybe kinda, but we’re still both drawing most of our experience from Omaha, Nebraska, right?

MAKO: Eh. Even when the few times I traveled across the continental U.S. it seems to hold.

SQEAKY: Yeah but that’s still like a very white waspy sort of intersection of the country, isn’t it?

MAKO: Kinda.

SQEAKY: Yeah. I’m sure there’s different views different places.

MAKO: Of course.

SQEAKY: But as part of the debate the person who called me out on it even brought up a Martin Luther King interview where Martin Luther King talked about Jesus being white so that was kinda silly. And the closest we could get was a number of Pew surveys and polls not about what color Jesus was but about the color of believers in our country and it didn’t really shed any light on the question.

MAKO: Mmm. Okay.

SQEAKY: ‘Cause like your skin color doesn’t really change what color you think Jesus was does it?

MAKO: Well if we don’t have information on what people think Jesus’s skin color is then even that we can’t really claim.

SQEAKY: Dammit you’re right but that’s really dumb.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: So we can’t claim to know that there is not a correl- Okay, you’re right. What skin colors people have could impact their decision and we don’t know that it doesn’t but it still means we just don’t know. We’re still in a big pile of I don’t know. Did I understand you correctly there?

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Well we don’t know on like a national scale or a global scale, like we know to our own experience but that’s limited.

SQEAKY: So I promise to hold a poll to rectify this.

MAKO: Oh god, why? Oh my. Okay.

SQEAKY: And I figure it’s been a year since we’ve had one of our flash drive giveaways, we should go ahead and do that again.

SUPPORT US [3:15] https://gleam.io/UK52e/dysevidentia-flash-drive-giveaway

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: Just like last time, it’ll cover two episodes, it’ll start the day… or the day before this episode comes out and yeah, there’ll be a bunch of different ways to win a flash drive, share on social media, visit some of our webpages, and like last time a secret code that we’ll drop somewhere in the episode and we’ve figured how to make it work per episode so there’ll be one in this episode and one in the next episode, and you put that in and you’ll get more chances to win. And there’s a question, “Do you think Jesus existed? And if you do, what race was he?”

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: I asked if you had any questions about the poll before we started. You opted to not dig in.

MAKO: And uh, yup, yup.

*Sqeaky chuckles*

MAKO: That’s what I got. Just a yup.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: I love it. I love it.

MAKO: I hate it.

SQEAKY: I’m gonna dump all of these important decisions on you in the middle of an episode recording from now on.

MAKO: The worst part about that is I believe you.

*Sqeaky chuckles and sighs*

SQEAKY: What other possible prize? We’ve been trying to come up with something good and we don’t want to be one of those places that just flips stuff from those custom print shops ‘cause we could just slap our logo on a whole bunch of stuff and ship it to ya but it would just be, y’know, another coffee mug or another low quality t-shirt. I think everyone has enough of those already in your life.

MAKO: Not the people who don’t like doing laundry.

SQEAKY: Oh you just get a new shirt from a new raffle? You just enter a bunch of raffles instead of doing them laundry?

MAKO: Yeah!

SQEAKY: Hmm. I think I need to restructure my life.

MAKO: You really don’t.

SQEAKY: Never doing laundry again. I’ll just need to enter raffles for eight to ten hours a day everyday.

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: In lieu of a better idea, I’m thinking from the four winners we’ll randomly select one and I will 3D print that person whatever they want within reason, I’m not printing them a gun or something.

MAKO: The Liberator?

SQEAKY: There’s new fully automatic ones.

MAKO: Oh. What do they call that one?

SQEAKY: I don’t know. Probably The Liberator Extreme or something?

MAKO: The Mega Liberator.

SQEAKY: They’re very American.

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: I don’t know. It’s just- A 3D printed gun feels American, doesn’t it? Even then the first one was called The Liberator. So American.

MAKO: Uh yes, calling it Liberator is definitely extremely, extremely American.

SQEAKY: Probably called “Freedom Dispenser” or something like that.

MAKO: Oh yeah their automatic high-speed freedom dispenser.

SQEAKY: Anyway if you want to get in touch with us if you have questions about the raffle or you find an error in our show there’s a whole bunch of ways to get in touch with us. Uh, our Patreon is patreon.com/dysevidentia.

SUPPORT US [5:28] Dysevidentia on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/dysevidentia

MAKO: We have a subreddit, r/dysevidentia.

CONTACT [5:30] Dysevidentia on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/Dysevidentia/

SQEAKY: You can tweet at us, @Dysevidentia.

CONTACT [5:32] Dysevidentia on Twitter - https://twitter.com/dysevidentia

MAKO: You can email us, contact@dysevidentia.com.

CONTACT [5:35] Dysevidentia by email - Contact@dysevidentia.com

SQEAKY: We have a Discord server and a YouTube channel, links for both in the show notes.

CONTACT [5:36] Dysevidentia on Discord - https://discord.gg/EZtcgdsCDA

CONTACT [5:37] Dysevidentia on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBbU3rnK52CXUkK0cJ-o29g

MAKO: We have a website, dysevidentia.com.

CONTACT [5:40] Dysevidentia.com - https://dysevidentia.com

SQEAKY: You can read the show transcripts and check our sources there.

MAKO: But we don’t have a Facebook ‘cause fuck Mark Zuckerberg.

SQEAKY: Oh! Here’s an idea! This has been floating around Reddit recently since the war in Ukraine started. There’s a… There’s a Vladimir Putin buttplug. I can’t print that one but I am sure I can scare something up that’s Vladimir Putin-shaped we can have people shove up their own ass.

MAKO: Stop.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: So… Is a terrible way to start off the segment.

MAKO: You keep using the word “so” and you keep beating yourself up after the fact.

SQEAKY: One of these times, I’ll beat myself up hard enough I can’t say the word.

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: Take that larynx.

*Sqeaky hits himself in the throat*

MAKO: Okay.

*Guitar riff*

MICROSANCTIONS AND THE RUMOR MILL [6:16]

SQEAKY: The rumor mill ruins everything, including wars apparently.

MAKO: Eh… I- Ruin wars? That’s a bold claim.

SQEAKY: Okay that was some bullshit phrasing on my part. But at least it ruins people’s views of the war and getting accurate information on the war.

MAKO: It’s disruptive. It’s very disruptive. Having clear information is always helpful for everybody involved ‘cause it makes people more informed for any decisions they make relating to it but there’s already enough difficulty getting reliable information during a war as it is just because of the nature of wars themselves. So having something extra being thrown into the mix to dilute that information is not ideal.

SQEAKY: That makes really good sense. I found a number of sources dealing with microsanctions but you found something bigger and more imposing at least physically?

MAKO: Uh it’s definitely… No I’m not gonna make that joke.

SQEAKY: It’ll burn up the morale of all the troops?

MAKO: It’s along those lines. Not gonna make that joke. Anyway.

SQEAKY: Okay, okay.

MAKO: Uh, but yeah. Mobile crematoriums. There was- I hesitate to even call it a report. There was a tweet early on in the invasion of Ukraine where somebody posted a video of a mobile crematorium with the claim that Russia was deploying these mobile crematoriums in their armored convoys.

SOURCE [7:20] Is Russia Using Mobile Crematoriums to Hide Evidence of Casualties in Ukraine? - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/russia-mobile-crematoriums/

SQEAKY: This person tweeted it. Anybody specific or just some rando?

MAKO: Near as I can tell it was just some rando.

SQEAKY: And they’re bringing mobile crematoriums in? The first time I heard you say this, I was thinking what are they gonna burn the Ukrainian civilians? What’s going on, what’s the plan?

MAKO: The claim that some people- a lot of people were making alongside this was it was actually to burn the dead bo- the bodies of the dead soldiers- the bodies of the dead Russian soldiers in order to cover up the losses. If you can’t recover the bodies you can’t prove that they died, you can report lower death numbers.

SQEAKY: That’s fucked up, I gotta wonder what it feels like to be a soldier marching off to battle with a crematorium following me instead of like a medic.

MAKO: This is pure personal speculation on my part but if there were mobile crematoriums and Russia soldiers were aware that it was a mobile crematorium, they would almost certainly be lied to about its purpose.

SQEAKY: That makes sense. How much do we actually know about mobile crematoriums? Are they real? Is it just the rumor mill or…

MAKO: So mobile crematoriums as an object absolutely do exist. And there’s a few different kinds and there’s even a Russian company that manufactures them and that’s actually where the video came from. It’s not a video that was taken from the border between Russia and Ukraine where these things were being staged –allegedly– it was actually a promotional video from the company itself that manufactured the mobile crematorium.

SQEAKY: Yeah, I read the source that said it was a company based out of St. Petersburg and it was just like in a parking lot there.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: And that video itself was originally posted on YouTube back in 2015 so it’s definitely not something fresh from this conflict.

SQEAKY: So at the same time Trump was running a campaign, Putin was showing off his mobile crematorium.

MAKO: I don’t know how much Putin directly can be attributed here…

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: …but let’s go with a solid ‘Maybe’.

*Sqeaky laughs and sighs*

SQEAKY: That’s some bullshit. I didn’t mean anything by that. Okay, okay, okay. Is there anything else you wanted to tell us about mobile crematoriums?

MAKO: The video is not of mobile crematoriums that are on the border itself.

SQEAKY: So this was a marketing video taken in St. Petersburg, nothing on the border. We don’t have anything firm about it going in then, do we?

MAKO: No, not really. We know it exists but that’s kinda about it, kinda. So there are some people, uh UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace claims Russians have previously deployed mobile crematoriums back in 2015 but didn’t offer any evidence for the claim. His claim was however backed up by U.S. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornburry as well as Ukrainian Agency Head –I am not gonna pronounce this correctly– Valentine Malivichanko… Mali-vi-chanko. I probably butchered that, I apologize, I do this a lot. And also by U.S. Representative Seth Molton. None of these people despite corroborating each others’ claims, none of them provided any evidence of their claims.

SQEAKY: So if we wanted to be charitable we could claim that maybe these people have access to-

MAKO: Classified materials and intelligence that they can’t share with us but they’re still aware of and felt that it was prudent to let that detail out.

SQEAKY: And on the flip side, U.S. Congressional Representatives also include people like Marjorie Taylor Greene who agree with things like Jewish space lasers that change balance and start fires in California.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay. So this goes firmly in the ‘I don’t know’ category.

MAKO: It’s possible. There might be mobile crematoriums but we just- we don’t have enough there to make the claim.

SQEAKY: Okay. And we probably could do some more digging in and maybe find something but it’s also the kinda thing that like, if you see it, a picture would go up pretty fast.

MAKO: Yeah, probably.

SQEAKY: It’s a big enough secret that I think it would leak. ‘Cause estimates of the amounts of Russia soldiers going into Ukraine, they’re in the tens of thousands aren’t they?

MAKO: Some early numbers that I read was that the number of staged combat troops was between 30 and 60,000 but that was really early on in the war and I don’t know how accurate those numbers still are.

SQEAKY: Well I don’t see reason to believe those numbers have gone down and asking sixty thousand people to all keep a secret or keep a secret from people who might be accidentally exposed to that situation seems like a very difficult task.

MAKO: Yeah. That’s something that you would definitely compartmentalize and like I said you would even lie to the crews themselves about what it’s there for and that’s assuming they were even aware that it was a mobile crematorium.

SQEAKY: Yeah it might just be the truck that sits at the back of the parking lot that no one talks about.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah. I mean, Walmarts have that truck sometimes. You don’t expect a mobile crematorium at a Walmart. Why would somebody expect one at their place of work?

MAKO: I have no real rebuttal to that, yeah.

SQEAKY: So maybe keeping the secret isn’t terribly hard or is this one of things where uh some truisms hold?

MAKO: Well even if-
SQEAKY: Oop.

MAKO: - the secret was to be kept from the Russian forces themselves, which seems likely, then you would still in like the wave of all these other vehicles being damaged and abandoned, you would probably find one of these lying around somewhere.

SQEAKY: This seems like maybe some truisms apply. People like to say that evidence of absence of absence isn’t absence of evidence and that holds right up until you’ve gone looking hard enough. I don’t have any evidence that there isn’t a tiger somewhere in my house but if you haven’t gone looking throughout the house you can’t disprove it. Now a tiger’s pretty exotic for a suburban household, but it’s happened. The Tiger King happened. That was a real thing.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: But I don’t think that mobile crematoriums are that exotic. All it takes is one modern picture leaking out. This could just be misinformation by western sources trying to stir some shit up, trying to demoralize Russia troops.

MAKO: And this is like the one bit of something that lends any credence to it is the original claim that they used mobile crematoriums back in 2015 and these other people corroborating that. Maybe that is even true and maybe Russians are simply not doing it this time so the claim this time is still wrong even if the one sliver of reliability that’s here is also true. Like these are separate claims.

SQEAKY: You even have it written in the notes: “TLDR: Insufficient evidence”.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: I think that also leans towards in this case we should default on the side of ‘Probably not’ but we’re not sure.

MAKO: Probably not. If I had to guess right now I would say no. This is just a false claim.

SQEAKY: Our main source on this is Snopes. They have a fact-checking page for Russian mobile crematoriums and they have a bunch of links and other subsources.

SQEAKY: Onto something a little sillier. Microsanctions. That’s a word I learned the past week.

MAKO: It’s definitely something new.

SQEAKY: So they’re a real thing, even if they’re silly. But the rumor mill has stirred up a bunch of dumb shit over this. A microsanction is something- some kind of sanction that a business owner or an individual attempts to levy against a country when… when the company’s done something wrong. So I dug around for a real example ‘cause there were so many stupid rumor mill things going around, but one bar owner in Philadelphia decided to start restricting and eventually getting rid of all of his Russian liquor sales. And he got to the point where he was accepting receipts or proof that a ten dollar donation had been made to a Ukrainian church and he would then let his customers dump out a bottle of Russian liquor and smash the bottle. Some people are comparing this to the Freedom Fries thing that happened a few years ago during the like Iraq invasion.

SOURCE [14:37] Microsanction are a real even if silly thing - https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/local-boycotts-of-russian-liquor-add-to-anti-war-efforts-in-philly-region/3161097/

SOURCE [14:52] Wikipedia on Freedom Fries - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries

MAKO: More than a few years ago!

SQEAKY: Oh my god! Zoomers won’t know about Freedom Fries will they?

MAKO: Probably not.

SQEAKY: Oh my god. Okay so, for Zoomers, Republicans have always been stupid. But, it used to be subtle and around 9/11 it became unsubtle. And it has gotten less and less subtle since then and now they’re saying all the quiet parts out loud. During the second Iraq War, so the time during 9/11, we disagreed about some of France’s policies about not helping us attack the people who took down the Twin Towers so we got rid of “French” in a lot of words and a lot of our terms- or Republicans tried to. So for a little while we didn’t have French fries or French toast, we had Freedom fries and Freedom Toast.

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: Do I have to get a source for this?

MAKO: You might.

SQEAKY: I lived it.

MAKO: Fortunately it didn’t stick but…

SQEAKY: It lasted like a year or two and yeah.

MAKO: As meme status, yes.

SQEAKY: Oh my god. Y’know thinkin’ about it, that was a really long time ago man.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: That was like- I worked at a McDonald’s at the time.

MAKO: Legit twenty years ago.

SQEAKY: Yeah. Yeah I was like a teenager? Yeah, wow. Anyway, people are saying this is the Democrat version of Freedom Fries: levying microsanctions against Russia. But I think this differs in a number of ways.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: The two big ones being that the state of Pennsylvania jumped on board and these people are putting their money where their mouth is. The Freedom Fries thing was largely elite and consumer driven. The elite would bitch and moan about it, but they’re also the people that never buy French fries, right. If you can afford escargot you’re not going to McDonald’s, that just isn’t how that happens. And consumers would go to McDonald’s and bitch and moan and start a fight the same way they do about masks today. Or maybe masks six months ago now that the mask thing is kind of going away after COVID.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: And when I say the state of Pennsylvania jumped on board, the quote from my source, I’m citing nbcphiladelphia.com, “The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, the state agency that oversees the sale of alcohol and wine, on Sunday announced that two Russian vodkas would no longer be sold in the state. Six other Russian liquor brands sold by special order would no longer be available the article commented.” So the state of Pennsylvania is issuing a state level sanction because this was such a popular idea there. And when I say these businesses are putting their money where their mouth is, their customers were buying Russian liquor and they’re cutting themselves off from revenue, but the Freedom Fries problem, the same people that were in charge of the t-shirt printing that would say, y’know, Freedom Fries or whatever on them, are the same people who were pushing the messaging. It was never a genuine message and this just looks very different. Okay. But still, microsanctions. Even the state of Pennsylvania can’t do much to hurt a national economy, right?

MAKO: The one thought that I had like the difference between these microsanctions and the Freedom Fries things is just on a fundamental level, one of these is objecting to war and the other one is calling for war.

SQEAKY: That is pretty fundamental.

MAKO: Yah. That’s a pretty big difference.

SQEAKY: Yeah that makes sense. Now I think the people who were pro-Freedom Fries messaging would have said the war in Iraq was justified, some people who were the people saying Freedom Fries back then still say that shit…

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: And looking back, it really wasn’t, right. There’s no way to get there, right?

MAKO: Not for the reason stated.

SQEAKY: Yeah that’s- that’s true. There’s other things we can say to try to justify that Iraq war but they stated the reasons that they stated. They could have gone with other ones.

MAKO: They could have but they didn’t.

SQEAKY: Yeah. And it was a bunch of lies, there were no weapons of mass destruction and I was just thinking about all the jokes at the time. Any time a celebrity disappeared they’re like “Where’s the celebrity?” Uh, next to the weapons of mass destruction. They’re just camping out.

MAKO: Hell of a camp.

SQEAKY: It’s a nice dry heat. Anyway, we didn’t come to discuss real goofy things but that- that’s important context for the goofy rumors. Are you aware that the movie Anastasia is no longer available on Disney+?

SOURCE [18:32] Disney+ did not remove Anastasia movie as microsanction - https://screenrant.com/anastasia-disney-plus-pulled-reason-why-russia-ukraine/

MAKO: Not having a description to Disney+, no, I was not aware.

SQEAKY: Oh. You can check out whatsondisneyplus.com, the source that our source cites. I cited screenrant.com ‘cause the other source is ad-infested shitpile.

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: But it does appear to have accurate information about what’s on Disney+ and it’s not there. Anastasia’s off, and the rumor mill has said that it’s uh Disney trying to profit off the Russian narrative and saying ‘Look, we’re doing bad things to Russians, the movie Anastasia’s not available.’

MAKO: If it was done since the invasion of Ukraine started I can understand why people would jump to that conclusion.

SQEAKY: It was like the day after.

MAKO: I can understand why people would jump to that conclusion.

*Sqeaky chuckles and sighs*

SQEAKY: So some problems with that narrative: It’s available in every other non-US country and it’s still available on Starz, the country that owns-

MAKO: Country?

SQEAKY: The company that owns the movie.

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: And it’s only not available in the US on Disney+ during contract negotiations between Disney and Starz.

MAKO: That’s hyperspecific, yeah.

SQEAKY: So the movie it turns out made a 140,000,000 in the box office like two decades ago or whenever the fuck it came out and is made by Americans and is being profited on by Americans and the official story is ‘We’re negotiating the contract.’ There’s no reason to disbelieve the official story, this is bullshit.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: But is an example of the rumor mill running amuck with microsanctions.

MAKO: Of course.

SQEAKY: Another stupid one was the ICF banning Russian cats. For those not familiar, the ICF is the International Cat Federation and they host cat shows.

SOURCE [19:58] ICF bans Russian cats, not Russian cat Breeds https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/international-cat-federation-bans-russian-felines-competitions-rcna18595

MAKO: I hate it.

SQEAKY: Sure. Yeah. You’re not wrong. But the rumor is that the ICF banned all Russian Blues from participating and people got upset ‘cause they’re like ‘There’s a breeder in San Francisco that breeds Russian Blues, you’re gonna Americans out of this thing because of a Russian war?’ And the rumor mill got all pissed about this instead of just checking for sources so I just asked for a source from the person that brought this to my attention and well, it’s just not what that short little headline would have you believe. It’s cats recently bred in and exported from Russia are not valid for participating in ICF cat shows. That isn’t gonna hurt anyone.

MAKO: Yeah. Well- Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: Just yeah I guess.

SQEAKY: It’s not gonna stop people from breeding or selling these cats, they can still sell them and eventually the war’s gonna end, I have to presume that after that this microsanction will be lifted.

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: But if the rumor mill would just ask for sources, this wouldn’t be a problem.

MAKO: It wouldn’t be much of a rumor mill then, would it?

SQEAKY: No I suppose it wouldn’t, and the world would be a better place.

MAKO: Yes.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Well. We both stumbled across this one. Ope, hang on. Our source for that one, I decided NBC News, it was the source that we dug into with the person we were debating this topic with but we both stumbled into the radiation around Chernobyl and the attacks on nuclear power plants.

MAKO: Yeah. That was something that happened really early on with the troops moving into Ukraine. They seized the area around the Chernobyl power plant or what remains of it and we saw radiation increases at the Chernobyl site.

SOURCE [21:36] Ukraine reports higher Chernobyl radiation after Russians capture plant - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-nuclear-agency-reports-higher-chernobyl-radiation-levels-due-heavy-2022-02-25/

SQEAKY: Not just increases but a twenty-times- I have the stupidest notes. I wrote “20x fold increase”. The fuck notes, come on! But a twenty- You’re just laughing at me!? Yaw-

MAKO: Yup it’s both. I’m both. It’s both.

SQEAKY: A laugh-yawn? Sorry, okay. Not just a radiation increase, but a twenty times increase in radiation. It has to be enormous. We all have to be dying. We’re gonna melt! Noooo! Zombies, ah!

SOURCE [21:54] Kyle Hill on the "20x Fold" increase of radiation at Chernobyl- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbrh7KOyuRY

MAKO: I mean it’s Chernobyl, that’s dangerous levels of radiation to begin with. Twenty dangerous? That’s really dangerous.

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: So patronizing! Oh m- That’s like if I was a ten-year-old and you said it to me like that and I wouldn’t believe you because of how stupid you sounded. That’s amazing.

MAKO: Good.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: So I didn’t get a good source like normally and you went and got two really good sources.

MAKO: They didn’t really establish numbers for the amount of radiation that was there. They- Or like the increases to the amount of radiation, they just focused on the fact that yes, there is radiation increases, no it’s not something that people in the area that actually have to work inside the exclusion zone have to necessarily worry about and it’s absolutely not a danger to anyone outside the exclusion zone. Even setting aside the initial reports on the amount of radiation increase that has occured at the Chernobyl site, there were concerns that this was the result of an attack and maybe there is- it was a careless attack, maybe it was a deliberate attack, maybe they’re trying to do more.

SQEAKY: I heard people throwing around the phrase “dirty bombs” multiple times.

MAKO: I mean yeah you could turn like with a little bit of difficulty depending on how recent the reactor is you can turn commercial nuclear power plants into dirty-ish-

SQEAKY: Couldn’t you just put big normal bombs under the reactors and or fuel sources, boom instant dirty bomb?

MAKO: Eh, that takes some more setup but it’s technically possible, yes.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: It’s just a lot of the normal safeguards for these reactors that exist to prevent other disasters work somewhat in favor to preventing that as well but it can be worked around with enough effort.

SQEAKY: Something that enhanced the fearmongering: Ukraine has a bunch of radiation sensors, particularly in the Chernobyl and Preparat- Did I say that right?

MAKO: I think so.

SQEAKY: Whatever that abandoned city nearly Chernobyl.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: They have a bunch of radiation sensors in that area and more across the whole country ‘cause they’re acutely aware of the problems and during the fighting and during the increase, a bunch of those sensors went offline, stopped reporting. And a lot of people were like ah yeah that radiation clearly took them offline, ignoring that there was a war going on. The war presumably caused the radiation increase and presumably disrupted the internet and other information sharing services causing the sensors to go offline. Ugh. So your sources, you have Reuters and CNN. Any specific claims they made over their or?

MAKO: Sorry. While you were describing that like- How terrible would it have been instead of the sensors going offline, the sensors just read 3.6 roentgens?

SQEAKY: What is that like face-melting levels?

MAKO: No, no, no. It’s not bad- Sorry. Not great, not terrible. That’s the word.

SQEAKY: It’s just like I don’t know what a roentgen is, my source went over sieverts, milli-, micro-, nano- sieverts.

MAKO: It’s a Russian unit of measure for radiation and it was the unit of measure- specifically 3.6 roentgens was the measurement recorded at the Chernobyl site when the meltdown was happening which is not particularly dangerous but the reason it was significant was because most of the sensors they had maxed out at 3.6.

SQEAKY: Oh shit! That’s not good.

MAKO: And when they brought a more sensitive, more industrial unit in it was actually reading 10,000.

SQEAKY: What the fuck!

MAKO: So- sorry. Me saying 3.6 roentgens is me nodding to the original Chernobyl disaster.

SQEAKY: Okay. I should watch the uh, the drama-

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: The dramatization, it’s really good.

MAKO: It is.

SQEAKY: My source. I picked a YouTube video from Kyle Hill, specifically because he’s recently been doing a multipart series on Chernobyl that’s very fact-based, he took a trip there, he’s trying to allay fears of radiation so he even took a geiger counter on the plane with him. I’m sure the TSA thought it was a bomb or something. I don’t know.

MAKO: Maybe.

SQEAKY: It keeps clicking! Is that a countdown?

MAKO: The clicks are getting faster! Clearly a countdown!

SQEAKY: Glove snaps on. We need to check you for more bombs, sir. Kyle Hill just has to bend over there. Ah, god.

MAKO: Mmm… Maybe that’s his fetish, I don’t know.

SQEAKY: Okay, maybe. His video took an extremely neutral stance on this.

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: ‘Cause he wanted to make something that withstood the test of time, he didn’t even say the Ukrainian invasion was good or bad, he’s just like ‘Here’s facts aside from that, this isn’t about an invasion’ and he explained what the different units of radiation were and what the jump was and even what the twenty fold increase was and he hypothesized that the change in radiation would be consistent simply with stirring up a bunch of dust in the area.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Just like you’d get if you march a whole bunch of troops and tanks through.

MAKO: Heavy equipment was the term used by the Reuters source that I have. But yeah, trucks and tanks going over soil instead of roads which you should be using roads but some of these people don’t give a shit about that and yeah they just stirred up the soil and moved a bunch of the radioactive soil into the air. Particulates.

SQEAKY: Yup.

MAKO: Probably the better word.

SQEAKY: That’s pretty much what he said too. He said that he hoped things didn’t get worse and he also made a nod to the fact that some of the workers there had been held hostage, he even made a nod to the hostages at Chernobyl but since he was trying to be apolitical he didn’t really linger on that. What do the other sources that we have say on the hostages?

MAKO: They were taken hostage and they continued to be hostages. They didn’t really dwell on the hostages all that much.

SQEAKY: Taking hostages during a war at a nuclear power plant seems sketchy.

MAKO: Very sketchy.

SQEAKY: Seems like civilian infrastructure to me.

MAKO: There are people that want to try to argue that it’s a war crime. I don’t know enough about war crimes to make that claim but people are trying to make that claim.

SQEAKY: I mean I feel like taking civilians hostages is a war crime but I don’t know. I mean killing civilians is but it feels like a crime against humanity.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: These people can’t go anywhere, they have to run the nuclear power plant and because they have this job you’re kidnapping them. That’s extreme bullshit.

MAKO: Yeah and it’s been brought up by many people that this is a high stress situation, they’re not really being given the normal downtime that they normally get and so their ability to maintain these facilities should be brought into consideration after I don’t know, weeks or less of being held hostage and it can create a very dangerous situation so people want a better resolution to this specifically very soon.

SQEAKY: Yeah uh, that’s fucked up. We don’t have good reports from the people on the inside-

MAKO: Nope.

SQEAKY: -or any other details like Russian demands or anything yet do we?

MAKO: Allegedly they are being held at gunpoint in some cases but beyond that not really, we don’t have good details.

SQEAKY: I never thought about the security implications of having your nuclear power plants taken over.

MAKO: So yeah, the initial fears of Chernobyl being attacked and having that turned into a dirty bomb it’s like well, but why? There’s not any real good reason to it unless you’re gonna try to treat that area as like using a scorched earth policy?

SQEAKY: Yeah. It uh, depends on what your goals are, right. If you’re a genocidal maniac and you just want to kill everyone in Ukraine, bombing nuclear power plants makes a ton of sense.

MAKO: Chernobyl’s location in Ukraine, it’s actually really close to the border. They’re gonna do more damage to Russia and Belarus- well maybe not more, I guess it depends on the direction the wind is blowing.

SQEAKY: They’ll do significant damage to themselves.

MAKO: Yeah. It’s really close to the border. That’s why it was taken so early in the war.

SQEAKY: Makes sense. But even then, that aside. Whether or not you want to pay horrible sisyphean costs in the first days of war, they’re looking to invade. Their goal is economic prosperity through violence.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: That to me says you want a metered level of violence, you want to take things, not blow them up.

MAKO: They don’t necessarily- Well, okay. We’re not a hundred percent sure what their goals are. The stated goals that I have seen is security interests of Russia and the implication with it is preventing more countries from joining the EU or NATO. But, beyond that-

SQEAKY: So looking like a homicidal aggressor, brilliant plan.

MAKO: Yeah. That’s uh, it’s definitely backfired for them on like every level. This war has backfired on Russia. But I- But beyond that, we don’t really have a good concrete idea of what their goals are or at least I haven’t read what those goals are.

SQEAKY: I’ve just kind of inferred them based on their actions.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: I mean, they marched into other places and took other things and it’s been heavily implied the Putin wants Russia to be richer and stronger and securing food and valuable resources in Ukraine seems like that’s a no brainer, he wants to be richer.

MAKO: And they’re fond of installing puppet governments in places that they move into so presuming that they want to do that and leave infrastructure available and workers alive stands to reason why to try to dirty bomb nuclear power plants? That doesn’t make sense.

SQEAKY: Yeah. A lot of people confuse irrational mega violent behavior with a different kind of rational than they’re used to. If you put yourself in Putin’s position, the only way that bombing Chernobyl makes sense is that he’s trying to cause as much short term damage as possible. That’s the only way it makes sense. If you’re looking for killing lots of people indiscriminately, that’s it, that’s the only time. So either you think he’s irrational and incredibly stupid or he’s, y’know this ultra-violent maniac, or Chernobyl being bombed is out of the question. That said, there could be accidents.

MAKO: Well, I was gonna say that said, there’s another nuclear plant.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: So we’re talking about the really big one, the one that’s still active?

MAKO: The largest nuclear power plant in Europe and the ninth largest nuclear power plant in the world. It is-

SQEAKY: What’s it called? Can you say its name for me?

MAKO: Jesus tapdancing Christ no I can not.

*Sqeaky chuckles*

MAKO: Let’s try. Zapor-iz-ihea?

SQEAKY: Good enough.

MAKO: Is that por-izea?

SQEAKY: I took one look at that and was like I’m gonna make Mako pronounce it.

MAKO: Yeah of course you are. Jerk. Anyway, that nuclear power plant was actually shelled by Russian troops.

SOURCE [31:59] Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant was shelled by Russian troops - https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/03/europe/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant-fire-ukraine-intl-hnk/index.html

SQEAKY: That’s scary.

MAKO: It happened on March 3rd, and no- fortunately, no essential structures or systems were damaged, the damage was exclusive to auxiliary buildings for reactor one. It did structural damage and that building did catch fire. The fire was extinguished with no further damage to anything else, it was just an auxiliary building, it was not anything that was critical to the ongoing function of the power plant at the time.

SQEAKY: So like, they damaged one reactor and lit the toolshed on fire? Is what it sounds like.

MAKO: They didn’t even damage one reactor. They… I guess they damaged portions of the backup for a reactor.

SQEAKY: Okay, okay. That makes more sense. Okay.

MAKO: Yeah. And that’s it.

SQEAKY: My fault. I heard the word “reactor” and auxiliary reactor systems building of some kind. Okay.

MAKO: Yep. That fire was extinguished and no further damage and there’s no measured increase of radiation at the site.

SQEAKY: Yeah they didn’t have soil, radiation in the soil to stir up.

MAKO: And there was- more to the point there was no puncturing of the reactors, there’s nothing leaking from the ongoing operation of the reactors. The reactors I do believe all but one of them has been shut down but I couldn’t find good confirmation on that.

SQEAKY: Interesting. If that were the case where would they be getting power from?

MAKO: Another power station from non-nuclear means that’s somewhere else.

SQEAKY: Okay. That makes sense.

MAKO: Yeah. At least that’s the claim. There was another plant, I forget what kind of energy it produces, it kicked on to compensate for the loss of power. And this is another case of the crew was held hostage, they are still hostages to the Russian troops.

SQEAKY: That’s kind of horrifying. A lot of people who are just doing their jobs being held hostages by an evading military force.

MAKO: Yeah. So, as much as we are saying that yeah, oh it’s ridiculous for Russia to directly attack a nuclear power plant, well we do have evidence that Russia directly attacked a nuclear power plant.

SQEAKY: That’s why I’ve been saying not attack the plant but to blow it up or bomb it.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: ‘Cause shelling near it versus blowing it up, very different things.

MAKO: Yeah. Deliberately targeting an active reactor in hopes of creating is… Yeah, it’s really really bad. Of course we don’t know what the Russians were told to do, we don’t know exactly what their target was, we don’t know what’s going on with that. We don’t know how much of that is intentional but regardless of what’s intentional, what was meant to happen, what did happen is a nuclear power plant got shelled.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: So we… We don’t know how much of what the Russian troops did to this power plant, how much of the shelling was deliberate. We don’t know if they were trying to target something else, we don’t know if they were told the building itself was something else, we just don’t know. But regardless of what was intentional and what wasn’t, what did happen was a nuclear power plant did get shelled.

SQEAKY: Yeah that makes sense and depending on how they got there, it could have been much worse. If it was bad intel, if they thought it was a factory, if they thought they were making weapons of mass destruction, if if if. You don’t have to put too many ifs in there to get to the point where they’re shelling reactors.

MAKO: Yeah.

*Guitar riff*

SPONSOR [35:07]

SQEAKY: Hey Mako! Check out this video.

*A video plays*

MAKO: Is that your PC hooked up to a Ukrainian air defense system?

SQEAKY: Yeah! Look at all the RGB!

MAKO: Clearly what every missile defense system needs.

SQEAKY: They confuse the Iskander missiles.

MAKO: How would you know that?

SQEAKY: Well, I set up both our PCs but only have ongoing video of mine. With the anti-missile RGB lighting.

MAKO: How did you get my computer? I just checked it and it’s still there.

SQEAKY: 3D-printed replica.

MAKO: But I turned it on. It booted.

SQEAKY: A deepfake boot screen. Should have checked harder.

*Mako is aggravated*

MAKO: Why do I bother. So who do I contact for a new PC?

SQEAKY: You and everyone outside of Russia should go to abkkustomz.com for your next custom gaming computer and support vicariously through microsanctions!

SPONSOR [35:50] ABK Kustomz, use code "evidence" for 10% of - https://abkkustomz.com/

MAKO: But only .43% of our downloads come from Russia. This isn’t going to impact anyone.

SQEAKY: Don’t ask about our Ukraine numbers. But still, no PCs for oligarchs.

MAKO: Do you think Putin listens to our show?

SQEAKY: Of course not. We would have told him to not listen to his own propaganda and he never would have been in this situation.

MAKO: Don’t forget to use code “evidence” to save ten percent on your next PC.

*Guitar riff*

NATIONSTATE BS [36:17]

SQEAKY: One would expect that the belligerent in the war would be the ones to do most the lying. We already demonstrated the rumor mill produces bullshit but- and I think most people expect Russian trolls in Russia to produce bullshit, but I think fewer people expect Ukraine to kill bullshit.

MAKO: Yeah. For sure.

SQEAKY: But we got some bullshit from everybody going on here, don’t we?

MAKO: A little bit. And it is kind of important to disambiguate not only the amount of bullshit but the quality of the bullshit, the quality in addition to the quantity, but you can get different kinds of bullshit showing up depending on who you’re talking about and what exactly their goals are. That being said, I would expect Russia to have very high quantity of bullshit and for that quantity to be distinctly more, possibly by a large margin than the Ukrainian government but I don’t know, maybe that’s baseless, I have no real reason to believe that but that’s just what’s intuitive to me.

SQEAKY: Well, Russia has demonstrated a great deal of effectiveness with their bullshit in recent history.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: I mean they got everything they wanted out of President Trump and I mean they had a President, they had a U.S. President. I don’t know that they had him in every way, shape, and form but they had so much. They got sanctions dropped, they got their own personal money freed up, they got territory in Syria, they got- yeah, so much- so many other things I can’t recall of the top of my head. Yeah. So, and they did it all through the power of bullshit.

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: If you just misinform people, people act randomly or unintelligently and sometimes they vote for Trump.

MAKO: Well, bullshit and money, but yeah.

SQEAKY: I suppose one helps the other, doesn’t it?

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: But I agree with you, largely the Russian bullshit has been transparent and obvious. It’s not subtly deployed at all like previous bullshit had been. The IStandWithPutin hashtag.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: People getting kicked off of Twitter for disingenuous behavior. Like no, nobody stands with Putin, fuck off.

SOURCE [38:07] Twitter banned many accounts claiming to stand with putin as obvious spammers - https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-bans-accounts-using-istandwithputin-for-violating-spam-policy-2022-3

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Don’t even have a source for that and we just saw it earlier today, it’s just such overt bullshit. Just a bunch of trolls with stock photos for their accounts pushing shit to go viral even though they have no followers. Clearly they’re just gaming Twitter.

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: So I guess the obvious thing to lie about it losses.

MAKO: Well, how the war is going and one of the most objective mectrics by which the war is going is either by land claimed or by forces lost, yes.

SQEAKY: Yeah, you’re right. Russia would want to inflate territory gained and deflate losses. But then the opposite: Ukraine would want to inflate Russian losses and deflate gains. For morale purposes.

MAKO: Oh yeah. All about morale.

SQEAKY: So you have some sources here, it looks like an image for…?

MAKO: Yeah. It was posted on Twitter by the Kyiv Independent.

BULLSHIT SOURCE [38:56] Kyiv Independent reports on Russia Losses - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FNRdiJ8WYAoWzW-?format=jpg

BULLSHIT SOURCE [39:01] Russian Ministry of Defense reported losses from the Ukrainian War - https://www.npr.org/2022/03/02/1083968591/russia-ukraine-deaths-war

SQEAKY: I’ll see if I can have our graphics guy go ahead and get these in the YouTube video but we’ll share with you some of the key numbers because it’s a small little infographic-looking thing.

MAKO: Yeah. This was information collected by the Kyiv Independent from the Ukraine’s Armed Forces, they do say that is “indicative estimates” by the Ukraine’s Armed Forces.

SQEAKY: So they give themselves weaseling room when they’re demonstrated to be wrong somehow.

MAKO: They’re also not being more specific than Ukraine’s Armed Forces, at least not in this infographic and so there’s a whole lot of fuzziness to this but they’re claiming more than 11,000 troops have been killed. That’s a really big number.

SQEAKY: And there’s a big headline. It says “Russian losses as of March 7”.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: So this is pretty fresh, we’re recording this end of March 7th, beginning of March 8th.

MAKO: Yup. So this is very, very fresh as of the day we’re doing this recording.

SQEAKY: It even says “Approximate, to be confirmed”. Some other big numbers there: 999 armored personnel carriers.

MAKO: That’s quite a large number.

SQEAKY: 40-something planes, fifty missile launch systems, boats, lots of fuel tanks, hundreds of cars, seven drones? Seven? That’s oddly precise.

MAKO: Yeah. I believe it.

SQEAKY: And 290 tanks.

MAKO: That’s a lot of tanks. They have been asking for a lot of anti-tank missiles.

SQEAKY: Okay, so in what ways is this bullshit and why would the Kyiv Independent or the Ukrainian military want to misrepresent this?

MAKO: Well I don’t know about the Kyiv Independent. I know nothing about them other than they exist and they’re reporting this. But Ukraine’s Armed Forces, as we stated this already, have a vested interest in keeping the morale high. The morale stays high, then people keep on defending, and they’re more successf- likely to be successful at keeping the Russians out.

SQEAKY: Yeah. No one wants to be fighting a losing battle. If you’re the underdog, you want to be the underdog and winning.

MAKO: Yeah. Or at least like hope to win, or something. If loss seems inevitable, you’re going to make loss more likely by simply not trying as much.

SQEAKY: Yeah and a lot of people confuse a twenty percent chance of victory with inevitable. I have this problem a lot when I’m playing games with people. I’ll see that there’s like ‘Oh here’s fifteen outs that you have’ and they’ll be like ‘Ah you have an overwhelming advantage’ and I’ll be like ‘Oh okay’ and I’ll stick it out and then people accuse me of being super lucky and I’m like well I just play each one out and sure, I have a one-in-ten chance of drawing the card I need or rolling the thing on the die I need, but the fact that I stuck it through until I had a very, very small chance of victory, yeah, they’re just trying to maximize those gains on a national level. And it does kind of suck that they’re misinforming their own people about having a one-in-X chance of winning making it feel more like…

*Sqeaky sighs*

MAKO: Well okay so declaring that they’re misinforming people might be a bit much. The thing is is like with the mobile crematoriums, we don’t really have much in the way of verification.

SQEAKY: That’s true I suppose. But we are using them as an upper end of a range.

MAKO: Yes. It is unlikely that the numbers would be higher than this.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: These numbers already are kind of unlikely but-

SQEAKY: Why don’t we go into some of Russia’s numbers and then let’s talk about accuracy versus precision.

MAKO: Okay so this one’s not quite as fresh, this is from March 2nd so five-ish days ago but the Russian Defense Ministry made an announcement about the Russian losses in Ukraine. They did not say anything about vehicles, they were only talking about Russian soldiers. They said that 498 and Russian soldiers are dead and 1,597 additional soldiers have been wounded or injured.

SQEAKY: And the Ukrainian source was actually really loose about this. They’re not claiming 11,000 troops dead, they’re claiming 11,000 troops lost. That gives them wiggle room to say ‘Oh they were injured’. But even by that number, the Russian number’s one-fifth the size. When I’ve heard estimates from the same day, typically the Russian number is five to ten percent or five to twenty percent of the Ukrainian number so yeah I see reason to believe that both sides aren’t putting forward their best effort to inform their people. The Russians are trying to make this thing look as cheap as possible and Ukrainians are trying to make it look as expensive as possible.

MAKO: Yeah.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: I also noticed we’re not talking a lot about Ukrainian losses.

MAKO: Yeah that’s something that I’ve been on the lookout for quite a bit and I haven’t really seen much about that.

SQEAKY: I suspect it’s just harder to track losses when you’re talking about an irregular force. I bet we know how many Ukrainian planes went down but we don’t know even how many Ukrainian fighters are on the ground.

MAKO: I don’t know, I haven’t seen much of it.

SQEAKY: But we have seen articles that oh, the city of Kyiv passed out 10,000 rifles to different citizens who promised to defend.

MAKO: Well 18,000 the night before they were expecting to- the initial Russians to show up in Kyiv. But yeah, you show up with a Ukrainian passport, you get a gun, and apparently they had distributed 18,000 automatic rifles.

SQEAKY: That sounds like a lot of guns to me. That’s a lot of irregulars to fight.

MAKO: Yeah, and then they put out instructions on how to make molotov cocktails and told people like ‘Oh these are the sensitive spots on Russian tanks, aim their with your cocktails’, yeah.

SQEAKY: I want to see the CDC warning for when Canada invades the U.S. “and here’s the parts of the Canadians tanks to avoid. This is the dangerous part. Minimize your injuries by going for the eyes” or whatever the… whatever the CDC advise will be.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: When Canada deploys the maple syrup bomb, don’t forget to double mask.

MAKO: They would never use a precious resource like maple syrup like that.

SQEAKY: By that logic, just because Canada has a strategic maple syrup reserve, the United States views cheese as a valuable important resource.

MAKO: Have you seen people weaponize cheese in war?

SQEAKY: No! No I haven’t!

MAKO: Well there you go!

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: I’ve got to cut out so much of me laughing at this bullshit.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Okay. Accuracy versus precision.

SOURCE [44:54] Math is Fun Accuracy vs Precision - https://www.mathsisfun.com/accuracy-precision.html

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: Right now I don’t think anyone has a real count of what’s going on. But there are counts that are more likely than others. And both of these sides are aiming for precision and wrong. Clearly Russia wants to undersell, clearly Ukraine wants to oversell and any reasonable estimate is gonna start above the Russian numbers and below the Ukrainian numbers. I’m sure the U.S. with all of our spies and satellites and drones and other ways that we know what the fuck is going on there better than either the belligerants, and I keep saying that word, belligerent is just one party of a war for people who haven’t heard that term before but the rest of the western powers have such good information-gathering resources that we know- I’m not gonna say exactly what’s going on, but we have a really good picture, better than previous wars.

MAKO: So there’s actually- Speaking of pictures, one of the only forms of concrete information we really have is satellite photos. Not just from military but like every available camera that we have in the sky is going to be pointed at Ukraine.

SQEAKY: Yeah we have a ton of mapping satellites, I bet Elon Musk has a few.

MAKO: Yeah, without a doubt. And so any time we see large-scale movement from troops or vehicles that would be abundantly apparent on any kind of satellite image, yeah, everyone’s gonna know about that and we’re gonna know about it with confidence. But everything else, like individual troops going places that’s not apparently clear.

SQEAKY: On a spy satellite they’re gonna be like one pixel, or some of the photons that make up one portion of one pixel, yeah.

MAKO: Yeah. They’re not gonna really see all that well and motivations like we don’t know why people are making certain decisions. We know there’s a seventeen mile long convoy that was making its way for Kyiv and it had stopped moving.

SQEAKY: Yeah we don’t know if they had technical issues, we don’t know if the convoy is a decoy. Maybe Russians are just fucking with intelligence planners trying to divert resources and it’s seventeen miles of empty trucks or something.

MAKO: Yeah, we don’t know. And a lot of these details that are coming out about what’s going on there, some of these things can be confirmed by first-hand accounts or an abundance of first-hand accounts through social media but most of it is hard to say because that’s war.

SQEAKY: When people say fog of war, this is what they’re talking about. It’s just very hard to know what’s going on because the situation is constantly fluid.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So when I say that western powers have the best information, don’t confuse that with western figures have an accurate body count. We might be better at getting at accuracy and we have less bias, and we might be able to do things like get the hospital records of both sides, but that doesn’t mean that we know for sure that the amount of people down to the last digit is the amount that has died, right. That just isn’t an acquirable number without lots of vetting and counting and checking after the fact.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: But what we probably can do is narrow it down to a range, and we probably-

MAKO: Somewhere between Russia’s count and Ukraine’s count.

SQEAKY: And even then I think the U.S. intelligence agencies can narrow it down a lot more than that but I bet that there’s some range that somebody has that’s probably 2 or 3,000 people in size, it’s probably like 4 to 6,000 people or something like that. Maybe-

MAKO: About 3,000 is the common number I’ve heard a lot of people say.

SQEAKY: And it might be around there, that might be it. It might be y’know, 3,000 plus or minus 500 people. And us not having access to that information, we need to have a wider range if we’re going to be accurate. We’re almost certainly correct if we say between Russia’s 2,000 and Ukraine’s 11,000. We’re almost certainly accurate, but we give up all manner of precision. And this leads into several logical fallacies. A lot of times people will believe numbers that just appear to have lots of significant digits. It’s like oh here’s how many millions of dollars the U.S. wasted hording cheddar, Canada lost hording maple syrup, it’ll be some seven digit number down to a number of pennies. And clearly that’s bullshit, right, we don’t know down to the penny because who knows how much that report cost to make, it was over a penny. But if you go with a range and accept that oh on things like this, things that cost millions of dollars, we’re gonna be off by potentially thousands of dollars but that’s okay ‘cause that’s still less than one percent, you can get accurate enough information even on a fluid situation to make meaningful decisions. And I’m certain that decision-makers for Ukraine and decision-makers for Russia have accurate enough numbers to make their own decisions even if they’re imperfect. They have ranges that are approximately good enough. I don’t know.

MAKO: Yep. We as civilians –in another country especially– are unlikely to get that information until this war is over.

SQEAKY: Or at least unlikely to get versions of that information that aren’t stale. There was a… Anonymous pulled a hack and got all the Ministry of Defense data from Russia. That was pretty good.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: If something like that happens again, maybe we’ll get some really accurate numbers. It’d be great to see a leaked Excel sheet that says ‘Publicly Claimed Deaths, Actual Deaths’.

MAKO: That would be very convenient labelling, yes.

SQEAKY: It would be in Russian.

MAKO: Of course.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: There was some other state-sponsored bullshit? I don’t know that it was state-manufactured but I think state-sponsored is fair to say.

*Mako sighs*

MAKO: So in the early days of the war, of course I say that as if this was something that happened decades ago, it actually only happened about a week-and-a-half ago but uh… do I have date? No I do not have a date. So in the first few days of the war, there was stories about an ace pilot, a Ukrainian pilot that downed six Russian aircraft in a twenty-four period. People started posting videos on social media claiming that it was the same person flying overheard and they dubbed this person the Ghost of Kyiv.

SOURCE [50:38] The Ghost of Kyiv - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_of_Kyiv

SQEAKY: That’s a pretty sweet fuckin’ name and a pretty good thing to put on your resume. What’s the problem with it?

MAKO: It’s probably not true.

SQEAKY: How probably?

MAKO: Well, there was one video posted that allegedly shows the Ghost of Kyiv getting a confirmed kill. Like shooting a missile, taking down a plane, and watching the wreckage falling to the ground. The problem with this is that the video was not real. Or at least it wasn’t any kind of actual real life combat, it was gameplay from a game called Digital Combat Simulator.

SOURCE [50:47] Is this video of the Ghost of Kyiv real? (no) - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-this-ghost-of-kyiv-video-real/

SQEAKY: Oh they just cranked the graphics up to eleven and ran it on a good computer?

MAKO: Well Digital Combat Simulator is aimed to be as extreme of a combat sim as a game can muster.

SQEAKY: So it probably looked really good and if you scale it from a 4K image or something and brought it back down to, y’know, 460p or something, it would probably be indistinguishable from reality.

MAKO: If you maxed the graphics settings, sure.

SQEAKY: Maybe at a grainess filter or something?

MAKO: But they tried to make all of the aircraft movement, the missile behaviors, everything as realistic to real life as possible.

SQEAKY: Nice.

MAKO: I actually watched a streamer recently, he was talked into playing Digital Combat Simulator and they’re like ‘Alright, listen, I fully endorse you playing this game but you need to understand before you start: You are going to be setting up controls for the first three hours’. He’s like, that can’t be right. One hour maybe, that’s extreme. One hour maybe. He was setting it up for three hours?

SQEAKY: On stream? That’s got to be a rough performance there.

MAKO: The community was engaged. They were like ‘Haha told you so.’

SQEAKY: I love it. I love it. It’s like one of those streams where people build a 3D printer and they get two hours into a four hour stream and they’re like ‘Oh, I don’t have any of the bolts I need’ and they just have to vamp for two hours.

MAKO: Yup. So anyway, that video was footage from a game. It wasn’t real combat footage. We know that. There’s other things. I saw individual reports where people allegedly were claiming that a former comic was the pilot was the Ghost of Kyiv it’s like no, there’s- I saw one thing- I didn’t actually include it into the show notes here because I couldn’t find anything to corroborate these claims but a bunch of different websites were like ‘Oh these people are claiming this about the Ghost of Kyiv and this is why it doesn’t work’ and one of them was like ‘Okay yeah this is allegedly a picture of the actual ace pilot but if we do this analysis of this image we see edits here, here, and here around the face and the flag and the patch’.

SQEAKY: Oh so they just swapped out a pilot from one country and put it in another one or something?

MAKO: Yeah, and claimed that was the Ghost of Kyiv. So with all these individual things where we could say okay well the person definitely exists, here’s some better evidence for it has been debunked. There’s no good evidence of the Ghost of Kyiv and even the footage where social media was trying to claim it was the same plane, same pilot each time, probably wasn’t. We can’t prove that it actually was.

SQEAKY: We don’t even have like the numbers that are on all of the planes?

MAKO: No.

SQEAKY: I worked for the Air Force and I don’t even know what those numbers are called. I was in the Chair Force area. I was always next to the coffee maker.

MAKO: So the claim that there is an ace pilot is something that we simply can’t verify.

SQEAKY: And it’s totally in the Ukrainian military’s interest to not debunk this.

MAKO: Yeah. Especially in the early days of the war when Ukraine was deeply concerned about what was going to happen as Russia ramped up its war effort, having that early report of somebody who is just exceptional is a big morale booster. And they would have every incentive to protect that morale boost.

SQEAKY: Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense. That’s the long and short of it.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: We can’t prove anything, but it’s highly unlikely this person exists in the way the rumor mill claims it exists and the Ukrainian government isn’t doing anything to disavow it and they’re the ones in the position to.

MAKO:They’re actually perpetuating it somewhat. They’re trying to claim that the number of kills that this ace pilot is now at ten.

*Sqeaky scoffs*

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: So yeah. But the Ukrainian government did not start it, it started as a social media thing and the Ukrainian government seems to have ran with it.

SQEAKY: Well our sources for that, we’ve got our two bullshit sources for it. The Kyiv Independent on the Ukrainian losses, NPR for Russian losses, and I believe NPR is doing accurate recording but-

MAKO: I don’t even want to dismerf the Kyiv Independent, yeah it’s important to understand that they’re reporting on somebody else doing the reporting and the other person is probably bullshitting. The Russian Ministry of Defense and the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

SQEAKY: So in both of these cases. We don’t want to insult the Kyiv Independent or NPR.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: We have no reason to believe the Kyiv Independent is doing bad reporting and I personally have every reason to believe NPR is doing good reporting.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Which is subtly different but I’m just saying we don’t know how reputable the Kyiv Independent is, they could be amazing or terrible.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: And either way both these sources are relying on their respective armed services to provide accurate numbers and we’re fairly certain that’s not the case. And then from all those weird caveats we go to a source that needs no caveats, Wikipedia.

*Mako chuckles*

SQEAKY: Wikipedia has an ongoing and evolving page on the Ghost of Kyiv, go check it out and its sources.

MAKO: And then specifically regarding the video we have a Snopes source.

SQEAKY: Yup. Okay. Onto external lies for personal gain.

MAKO: Oh boy.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: Uh, are we cool with saying I’ll 3D print something and ship it to people? Is that just too fucking stupid?

MAKO: I mean. We have to riddle it with like disclaimers, there has to be limits on this.

SQEAKY: Yeah, yeah. I’m not 3D printing a Death Star.

MAKO: You wouldn’t 3D print a Death Star.

SQEAKY: Yeah I fuckin’ would.

*Guitar riff*

LIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT [56:23]

SQEAKY: Not all lies come from belligerents or the rumor mill. Some are deliberate and put out there for fun and profit.

MAKO: Fun?

SQEAKY: Explain to me what 4Chan is doing without that word.

MAKO: Uh… There’s a word for it but I’m trying to…

SQEAKY: Lolz?

MAKO: No…

SQEAKY: Malice?

MAKO: Malice… I would definitely describe some of the things happening at 4Chan as malice, yes.

SQEAKY: I would argue they do malice for fun.

*Mako sighs*

*Sqeaky chuckles*

SQEAKY: Sorry, that was a trap. If you’re listening to a podcast for up to date news you’re doing it wrong.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah. We record, we edit, we release, and there’s like a week-long delay. We’re not professionals, we’re not journalists. We’re two software developers who’re like, we should analyze some of this shit that’s out there. And we take time to analyze and make sure that we’re not saying overtly stupid things. Unlike Tucker Carlson.

MAKO: It’s a really low bar but yeah, yeah, we clear that bar.

SQEAKY: So just before the invasion or just after the invasion he had a show, and I’ll link to it, there’s a Newsweek bit that accumulates a few of his tweets in a… an eight minute segment of his show where he’s downplaying everything Russia is doing and why we should hate the totalitarian dictator who’s starting a war of aggression. And he tries to blame all of our problems on Kamala Harris, Democrats, the libs, uh… not being toxicity masculine enough or whatever the fuck he’s talking about it. I listened to it and it’s like dude, you said a very little in eight minutes of talking. But he was forced to- but he did backpedal almost immediately, like the next day. Things like he claimed that Ukraine was a totalitarian government, I mean that’s theoretically possible, that’s hypothetically possible, but Zelensky was just elected in 2019, not exactly enough time to cement a government, right, and I’ll link to the Wikipedia page on Volodymr Zelensky so you can see when he was elected, what he did, and see his bloodthirsty and power mongering chops as he played Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian dub of the movie Paddington.

SOURCE [57:20] Tucker Defends Putin - https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-fox-news-1681740

SOURCE [58:07] Wikipedia on Zelensky - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy

SOURCE [58:09] Wikipedia on Ukraine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: I also have a source, Vox Ukraine, that goes in depth with the imperfections in the Ukrainian government and it even has a democracy index of two different observers and both rate Ukraine in the middle of the European powers in terms of how much power the executive can assert. It tries to balance that a chief executive that’s too weak results in a country that gets nothing done, like the United States, or an executive that’s too powerful can result in a country where the executive stomps all over everyone, like the United States- wait, that’s imperfect. Our executive is way too powerful in some things and then just shitty in others. I don’t know. But Ukraine seems to have a halfway functioning government.

SOURCE [58:21] Analysis of power of Chief Executives of several european countries - https://voxukraine.org/cards/pravlinnya/index-en.html

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: There’s no legitimacy to claim it’s totalitarian, and here is a cable news reporter making that claim in primetime.

MAKO: “Reporter” is generous.

SQEAKY: Yeah. It is. So this is from the same news organization that had Sean Hannity participating in the Jan 6th insurrection and being subpoenaed by the committee investigating that insurrection so a co-worker of that guy. That doesn’t make Tucker Carlson guilty for certain, but he’s saying so many demonstrably wrong and untrue things and immediately playing to his political talking points. Like he claimed that it was Kamala’s job to “open the Mexican border and she did it”, which what does it even mean to have an open versus a closed border, it’s clearly bullshit talking points.

MAKO: This is my first thought is what does that even mean.

SQEAKY: It’s a general fear that Republicans have that Mexicans will just get to walk into the country with no process. Why they’re afraid of that even perplexes me, but.

MAKO: Well we know that Republicans or conservatives have been told that populous of Mexico consist of criminals so yeah if you already have this preconceived notion that they’re call criminals and then you just open up border and let criminals flood into your country…

SQEAKY: Yup, racism.

MAKO: Fear naturally follows but yeah, there’s a lot of steps to get there.

SQEAKY: Yeah there’s a… there’s a lot of just racist bullshit there. He then went on to claim that it was Kamala’s goal to keep the border of Ukraine closed to keep Russians from coming in like an invasion was the same thing as the Mexican immigrants peacefully trying to get jobs.

MAKO: Yeah. And even that is actually not true. People were talking about it I saw on Reddit, going into detail about the agreement that we have and there is on firm defense pact that we have with Ukraine.

SQEAKY: Yup.

MAKO: It’s just not existent. We do have an agreement… I don’t know enough about this to speak authoritatively about it but for the agreement that we do have we actually have been fulfilling that.

SQEAKY: Okay.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Well, per Tucker Carlson’s own backtracking, he missed that Kamala was over there to attempt real diplomacy in order to prevent war, and he claimed that it was “too low-grade to be relevant” and that’s why he and his team missed it. And I’ll link to him backtracking, there’s an MSN article that covers it, but yeah, yeah, this is uh, this an example of someone who is lying and misinforming. Almost certainly he was given some sort of talking points or instructed to take a pro-Russian stance because of how close Fox News is to Trump.

SOURCE [1:01:08] Tucker backpedaled but only the things that could be verified, he stood by his other BS - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/tucker-carlson-admitted-he-was-wrong-to-praise-russia-before-its-invasion-of-ukraine-but-turned-it-into-an-attack-on-kamala-harris/ar-AAUBUXC

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: And Trump has to be extremely pro-Russia ‘cause that’s at least some part of his backing so this- it all makes sense that if you’re going to be misinformed you might do something silly like believe Russian diplomats. Don’t do that.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: For Sean Hannity being on the Jan 6th insurrection check out episode 26, The Big Lie One Year Later, I’ll make sure that I put a link to it in the YouTube video. Um… You have anything else on that one?

SOURCE [1:01:42] Hannity was in on Jan 6 - https://dysevidentia.transistor.fm/episodes/0026-the-big-lie-one-year-later

MAKO: Nope.

SQEAKY: When I was snooping around looking for more just bullshit misinformation on the war, I found one that seemed to appeal greatly to conservatives and it shows why. It was- The catchy title was “Condemn War Everywhere”. And they have a map, it’s big bright and red, and it’s a bullshit map. I’ll see if I can have our art guy put one of these maps up in there but it’s just the world with red and all the places where there’s fighting or where there’s been bomb strikes or anything like that, they put it on the map and they’re all the same color of red ignoring that a lot of these places have civil war, wars that have already been condemned that everyone’s trying to prevent, or it’s like one country is doing counter-terrorism operations against another, these are all very different kinds of fighting and the only war of aggression that we have where just one country is trying to conquer another uh it’s Russia trying to conquer Ukraine and even that might not be true but this is the new one, this is the one that’s like on a lot of people’s doorsteps. Poland has a much smaller vested interest in India fighting Pakistan and their border skirmishes over Kashmir than they do about their neighbor being hostally invaded by one of the largest militaries on the planet. It’s a very different thing. Full scale military action from Russia, China, or the United States should scare people more than full scale military action from anybody else.

SOURCE [1:02:02] Condemn War Everywhere - https://medium.com/@Pac76/fact-checking-condemn-war-everywhere-map-on-reddit-and-instagram-ukraine-4e107495e5e5

MAKO: Yeah. Especially ‘cause not only because of capability but also because once they do this, what are they going to do next?

SQEAKY: Yeah we tried that appeasement thing a few times with other leaders and that didn’t go well. We had a whole world war about it one time.

MAKO: Yeah. Well there’s also just Crimea. Same Russia. They took Crimea and now we’re here. It’s like well okay, clearly they’re gonna keep on going, other countries have talked about well we’re next if you don’t stop this here and now and enough people agree that we’re trying to stop this here and now.
SQEAKY: Yeah how do we know this won’t be Finland or Poland next time, yeah.

MAKO: Uh Moldova I think specifically was the loudest to say that they could be next.

SQEAKY: Goodness, I know people there. That’s uh… that’s horrifying to think that co-workers I’ve had could be under the gun.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Condemn War Everywhere is too condemning Ukraine as All Lives Matter is to BLM. People don’t think All Lives Matter is overtly racist but it kinda fucking is. If a group thinks their lives don’t matter and they’re protesting just to have you acknowledge that their lives matter but then you’re like ‘Well all lives matter’, did you even listen to what the messaging was here, why they think their lives don’t matter? Yeah, there are years of racially motivated police violence and then Russia has been trying to stand up a puppet state in Ukraine and trying to incur on their sovereignty, there’s uh, some really big problems and then immediately just trying to change the narrative from ‘Help, I have problems’ to ‘Everyone has problems’ is some bullshit.

MAKO: If someone doesn’t have the background knowledge to this, I kinda understand them responding that way. But especially now, there’s enough of the background knowledge that has been put out there that it’s yeah, it’s difficult to claim otherwise. Not impossible, but difficult.

SQEAKY: Yeah. Um, to push this one step further for this all wars matter thing, it came from a Russian state news outlet and was picked up by a bunch of right-wing conservatives in the U.S. and spread that way. It’s the same people that ate up the All Lives Matter are eating up the Condemn Wars Everywhere bullshit.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: It’s easier to share a tweet than it is to actually give a shit about a problem and try to do something to help. Yeah. I’m not saying anything you’re saying is wrong with that but-

MAKO: The phrase “All Lives Matter” is completely stripped of any kind of connotation, subtext, political attribution, completely stripped of all that.

SQEAKY: You’re completely right. Stripped of all those things, it’s good, there’s even context where it would be good, right. If we’re staring down Thanos who’s going to kill half of people and we say all lives matter, that’s very different than you’re talking to someone holding up a sign saying don’t let others die like Brianna Taylor and you’re like ‘But all lives matter!’ but we’re here at a protest where no one’s dying but we’re talking about a woman killed in her own room with no valid search warrant. That’s really different.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: And this is the context here. The context super matters and it’s only in that context that Americans have been pulling this out: The wrong context.

MAKO: Mhm.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Yeah, yeah. To go further in the right-wing conspiracy theorist nonsense I’ve got a link to… got a link to some fools on Twitter and it’s those Q supporters who said “Better Russian than Democrat” and they’re still saying stupid stuff.

SOURCE [1:06:15] Q supporters who said Better Russian than Democrat stand by it - https://twitter.com/jpelzer/status/1498759971076546560

MAKO: Of course they are.

SQEAKY: They think Zelensky and Putin are collaborating.

MAKO: Sure.

SQEAKY: To expunge the deep state from Ukraine.

MAKO: Always the deep state with them.

SQEAKY: Clearly these people started off as Trump supporters and kept some of his talking points seemingly at random ‘cause that’s what you keep when you’re not basing anything on evidence and they kinda ran with it and they’re like nope, here’s what I gotta say to… here’s what I got to say to make it so I’m not a hypocrite, here’s the mental gymnastics I need to perform so I’m not wrong, and you wind up with this. People in the middle of Texas who don’t know anything about foreign relations who think they’re experts. Like how many times during this show do we say “We don’t know”?

MAKO: A lot.

SQEAKY: Or limit what we could say, right?

MAKO: Probably more than a lot of other episodes recently.

SQEAKY: Yeah. We don’t know a lot but we understand the bounds of information, right. We don’t know how many hundreds or thousands of dollars died but we can provide mechanisms for saying here’s how you vet information that you get. These guys have no information and are claiming to know everything.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Some bullshit. Our sources for that, we’ve got Newsweek, Vox Ukraine, I’ll put two links to Wikipedia in there –one for Zelensky, one for Ukraine–, MSN, Dysevidentia episode 26, medium.com has a lengthy article dismantling the Condemn War Everywhere, yeah dismantling the meme, and a Twitter link to those… and a Twitter link to those perpetually intellectually underachieving Q supporters.

MAKO: On to something like?

SQEAKY: Yeah, on to something light.

*Guitar riff*

MAKO:

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO:

*Guitar riff*

END ON SOMETHING LIGHT [1:07:50]

SQEAKY: On to something light. So I didn’t even know that there was a new batman movie coming out but I guess The Batman has come out.

MAKO: Yeah I only recently heard about it, when I say recently I mean like yesterday in relation to sanctions. They’re like ‘Yeah The Batman’s not gonna be shown in Russia’. It’s like, this is a thing? Okay.

SQEAKY: Does that count as a microsanction?

MAKO: I guess, yeah.

SQEAKY: For reference, that’s the… that’s the secret code for this episode. Go up to our Gleam raffle, there’ll be a link in our show notes, there’ll be a link on our website if you go to dysevidentia.com and click the About button, the raffle will be right there you can enter it right there or yeah- but enter MICROSANCTION, m-i-c-r-o-s-a-n-c-t-i-o-n.

MAKO: All one word, all uppercase.

SQEAKY: Yup. I suppose that if they don’t get The Batman they don’t get the bat that worked its way into an Austin theater either, do they?

SOURCE [1:08:39] BATS!!! At The Batman - https://www.huffpost.com/entry/real-bat-the-batman-screening-austin_n_622662e6e4b03bc49a9f8268

MAKO: Well I would imagine most people by default don’t get that bat but yes.

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: This is so ridiculous. I’m trying to imagine the chaos that would break out as there’s a bat squeaking and making noise and they’re like ‘Stop it! The bat-’ and they’re like ‘Shut up don’t comment on the movie’ and they’re like ‘No there’s a real fucking bat. Rabies!’

MAKO: It’s like ‘Yes I know we all bought tickets, come on!’

SQEAKY: ‘The Batman has rabies, what!?’

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: The General Manager at the theater has said that they’re adding additional security and checking all bags upon entry.

MAKO: Do they think it was brought in?

SQEAKY: That’s the going theory, they don’t know.

MAKO: Oh god, okay.

SQEAKY: So if somebody in Austin is lucky enough to win one of our flash drives and they’re the selected winner for getting a 3D item printed, request a bat, it’ll be great.

MAKO: Wow. Okay.

SQEAKY: What other things could be 3D printed that would be amazing for our listeners?

MAKO: I… A fidget spinner? I don’t fuckin’ know.

SQEAKY: I could do that. I have spare bearings.

MAKO: I don’t know.

SQEAKY: There were no reports of anyone being bitten at the theater and apparently less than one percent of wild bats in Austin have rabies so I guess that’s good.

MAKO: That’s definitely good. Better than it being the opposite of that and ninety-nine percent of them having rabies.

SQEAKY: That’d explain why it would want to see a DC superhero movie?

MAKO: What the-

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: You’re not wrong, you’re not wrong.

*Sqeaky sighs*

MAKO: DC live action movies are not good.

SQEAKY: I don’t know, man. The Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy didn’t suck.

MAKO: Okay, you’re right. I will amend that to-

SQEAKY: That’s not part of the expanded universe though is it?

MAKO: DCU.

SQEAKY: Yeah, they had Wonder Woman and then they ruined it with 1984.

MAKO: Wonder Woman was good, it wasn’t great but it was definitely above the rest. I want to say there was another movie but I can’t really remember it.

SQEAKY: That’s telling. There was one another movie and you can’t remember it.

MAKO: One other movie that was like kinda goodish but yeah none of them are stellar and a lot of them are garbage.

SQEAKY: That’s rough. Anyway people didn’t come for our movie reviews.

MAKO: No.

SQEAKY: We should call it here.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Thank you for listening.

MAKO: Thanks for listening.

*Guitar riff*

*Mako hits microphone*

SQEAKY: Thanks to Qel-

MAKO: Sorry.

SQEAKY: Perfectly timed head bump into the microphone.

*Guitar riff*

MAKO: Thanks to Qeldaar for video and graphics work and thanks to AlphaWolf294 for transcription.

SQEAKY: Thanks to all of our Patreon supporters. Our supporters at the Evidence Investigator level or higher include Jarrod, DuktTape, Steven Larabee, and Kaiju Halena.

MAKO: Thanks for listening and don’t forget to like, subscribe, leave a review or tell a friend.

SQEAKY: If you aren’t sure where to do that, read the show notes, transcripts, and listen online at dysevidentia.com. Support us financially at patreon.com/dysevidentia, chat with us at our subreddit, r/dysevidentia, tweet at us @dysevidentia, chat on our Discord or what our videos online and email us at contact@dysevidentia.com.

MAKO: Copyright 2022, BlackTopp Studios, Inc. Intro music was Slow by Pit X, used with permission.