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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26235 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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I only glanced at this story briefly last night, but: isn't 68 Bq/kg less than the radioactivity of bananas?

I also concluded that they must be worried about contamination that they missed - if some cesium capsule leaked a tiny bit into these shrimp, does that mean there was a tiny leak, or does that mean there was a big leak but this particular sample only included a tiny bit of it? Imagine if the most contaminated packages ended up near the center of a different shipping container, hidden from detection by a meter of cargo in every direction.

Switching from normal brain to crazy internet-addled brain: is there any chance this could have been a penetration test rather than unintentional contamination? Customs doesn't check every import for radioactivity because they're worried about shrimp with the power of bananas, they do it because after 9/11 we spent like a billion dollars on radiation portal monitors designed to detect "dirty bombs". If I was a psychopath looking to slip something by those monitors, I wouldn't want to blow my shot without a test run first, and I would want that run to have some kind of relatively-innocuous plausible alternative explanation in case the pen test didn't pen. If a dirty bomb hidden inside a bunch of radiation shielding still leaks as much gamma as a pallet of barely-contaminated frozen shrimp, well, then, barely contaminate some shrimp and send them through first and see if anybody freaks out.

My tinfoil theory is that this is a false flag by the Louisiana seafood industry to scare people out of buying imported shrimp.

"After an incident involving an undersea nuclear test, Forrest and Dan turn out to be the only shrimpers catching non-radioactive shrimp..."

It checks out- everyone already knows in the back of their mind that the Chinese have no standards for what they feed their shrimp and crawfish before exporting the things.

Also, I checked the banana stats. A single banana might output 15 Bq…but this is not directly comparable to the dose from eating one. That has more to do with how the body eliminates the potassium. It’s different for every isotope, and the FDA doesn’t even bother to set a standard for potassium.

The work to intentionally contaminate some shrimp is going to bring plenty of scrutiny. That’s like preparing to hijack a plane by carjacking an 18-wheeler.

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