Intergalactic Summit

I would like to note that the most the State itself contributed to the solution would be failing to stop, or even wound anyone during a firefight, then one of their personnel - already infected - trying to run and violate quarantine, not to mention his colleague trying to cover up what he'd done.

I might also salt the wound by saying that a few Gallente were really helpful in the proceedings.

Word to the wise, anyway, if you are planning on screeching at the people who worked over those past few days - make sure you, or at the very least your nation, had something to contribute. I understand it's easy to criticize when a bunch of miners doesn't get in your face, trying desperately to ensure they don't get obliterated by an orbital strike.

Not to mention ongoing cases of sabotage and an atmosphere that... almost until the end felt like it's going to end in a stationwide baseliner riot.

As an Addendum - as I have already expressed previously, it was a pleasure to work with the Arataka Research Consortium. Your... odd degree of professionalism, backed up by hard work might have been a good chunk of what steered this situation away from total and utter disaster.

I would have thought the faithful of Amarr would be delighted.

Nothing demonstrates evidence for the existence of God better than a miracle cure for the worst disease ever known, handed down mysteriously from on high, and which is completely free of any side effects unlike any medical advance ever made by unaided humans.

Thought I guess it's tempered a tad by the Minmatar becoming the Chosen People for the Kyonoke Miracle.

You have it reversed: Kyonoke itself was a gift from God sent by God to his Chosen people that we might weaponize it and turn it into an instrument for the genocidal extermination of the Minmatar people. I suspect that the mysterious "nationalists" were trying to do just this.

However, the Minmatar employed their dark sorcery to thwart the nationalist Kyonoke weaponizers and produce the cure that was as much science-defying as Kyonoke itself.

This entire drama has been an occult war since the beginning, and you people with your "science this" and "science that" are too blind to see it.

Yes, and we all know that people, in large groups, are totally rational actors and not at all subject to detrimental behavioral patterns like 'mob mentality' or 'mass hysteria' that actually get called things like that because they arise in group behavior, right? That never happens.

Unscrupulous marketers and corporations never seek to profit off of those behaviors, either, especially when the demand for their exclusive product will be something around 99,99999% of all of humanity.

That'd never happen. No no, we can totally trust that nobody's going to decide this is something that should be spread wider. None of those Senators, Chiefs, corporate executives, any of them, have any susceptibility to the kind of fear-laden poor decision-making that absolutely every human being falls prey to at some point in their lives. Especially not where the singular medical boogeyman of out time is concerned.

You're putting a whole lot of faith in a bunch of humans acting in a way humanity has never acted before. Individuals can be rational in a crisis. The larger the group, the less rational the group behavior.



How? They're not getting clear reporting about what this even is, and neither are we. Is this a vaccine? Is it a cure? Is it an 'antidote' as they're being told it is, despite that being categorically impossible because Kyonoke's not an ingested poson?

They're not being given accurate information. How can you expect them to make informed decisions? How can you expect them to 'know' things they're not being told?

Does that now include you, as you whine about 'whining'? How very meta.

I'm not sure what stimulant you're on Arrendis, but you should probably lay off of it before you stroke out on us.

As Aria tried to warn Ronin once: I am incredibly pedantic. This kind of worrying (in the gnawing, not the anxiety, sense) over a bone of contention? This is how I relax. There is literally no point at which this will not be fun for me.

Especially not when I'm right. Which I am.

I do apologize for coming in a little late to this part of the conversation.

I would like to ask for an update on the quarantined populations of the effective area and what steps are being done to assist them since now we have a vaccine/antidote in place.

Step 2: Tell the damn truth.

In any crisis situation—which this still is—clear, accurate information is absolutely the most critical thing. Nobody can make informed, intelligent decisions without it. And we're not gettng it here.

Stop calling it something it clearly isn't. If it's a cure, or a treatment, call it that. If it's a vaccine, call it that. If it's a hybridized self-replicating nanovirus that functions as both, call it that. Do not go trying to dumb it down for the masses in a way that puts out false information, like the idea that it's an 'antidote'. That's about as accurate as calling it a 'starship'.

That dissemination of bad information doesn't just make it hard to understand what the treatment is. It also makes it impossible to trust any of the other information coming from the same sources. If I tell you five things, and one of those five things is literally impossible on the scale of 'that red dwarf is green', then you can't trust the rest of what I've claimed is true, either.

Step 3: Actually secure the quarantines.

We've been told, and had it confirmed by a member of my own alliance now, that miners got out of the Astral Mining platform, and made it to the Keepstar. We have absolutely no indication that they were, at any point, spotted by the security perimeter forces, and a decision was made to allow them to go to the keepstar because both sites were affected. We might like to think that, but we have no actual evidence to support it, which means we cannot assume that to be the case. This means that, so far as we can currently ascertain, the quarantine perimeter is not secured, and has not been over at least the last few days. Again, we can hope it is, but that's worthless in dealing with a crisis: you need actionable information, and you need to act based on what you know. So right now, we do not know the quarantine zones are secure. We do know that the quarantine zones need to be secure. So make sure they are is kind of a high priority here, before we start making them more permeable by letting aid workers go in and out.

Step 4: More controlled testing, under actually controlled conditions.

The quarantine zones are not controlled conditions. We do not have sufficient data about the environments or the people in them to consider them as such. We don't know how 0410 interacts, for example, with other diseases. Does it turn the common cold into a Kyonoke-level killer? No idea, but we'll put it into a population whose health we have no real, concrete data on, and whose conditions we are not, in fact, capable of adequately monitoring. This is reckless, and it is dangerous.

Nor do we know what the long-term effects of the treatment are on the uninfected. We're told there's a scanner now that works totally amazingly great at detecting Kyonoke. We have no data. We have no assurances that it doesn't register false positives, which would result in administration of the treatment to an uninfected individual, and we have no assurances that there is not a level of 'too little to detect' at play, like there is with literally every other pathogen ever known to man. The idea that this once we've got perfect detection capabilities and history's first known treatment without side effects is... I don't even know how anyone can take that seriously.

We also don't know about the long-term effects on the people who legitimately are saved by this treatment. Not a clue. We've got a whole keepstar set up for laboratory facilities and a bunch of people who've had the treatment administered, but why bother actually focusing on the controlled environment when we can start shipping this stuff out to where we have no idea what it will do or what condition those people are actually in? Eighteen months of testing is not a lot of time. Frankly, in medical testing terms, it's radically insufficient. Two to Five years is more normal, and that's for treatments for non-life-threatening pathogens, not a treatment for 'OH MY GOD THE DISEASE THAT WILL LITERALLY KILL EVERYONE IF WE DON'T ACT NOW NOW NOW'..

Then you get into a damned OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. This current strategy has basically leapt to Decide' and 'Act' without any damned 'Observe' going on. And that's pretty much a recipe for disaster. Which is why I started at Step 2, because...

Step 1: STOP LETTING THE TERRIFIED PEOPLE WHO ARE ALREADY INFECTED AND DESPERATE FOR A WAY OUT MAKE THE DECISIONS, DAMMIT.

Seriously. Aria's posts have consistently demonstrated exactly the levels of fear she's admitted to experiencing. I'm not singling her out here to pick on her, either. Two things I very much respect about Aria Jenneth are that she is a relentless and thorough observer of her own mental state, and that she is scrupulously, sometimes painfully honest about it.

Aria is not a timid little thing, prone to being terrified or over-reacting to danger. Aria goes hunting Drifters in ships that, if she's moving too slow or in too straight a line, will explode if a Drifter sneezes. Aria is someone whose competence and ability to work without being influenced by fear has earned my respect, and my trust.

Aria Jenneth is terrified, in her own understated way. This is not unusual. Disease does that. Disease, especially disease that impairs or alters the brain, is an insidous thing, an enemy you can't really fight, an enemy where even the experts can only make something to fight it for them, and hope it can do the job. And those people are also in there, exposed, and almost certainly terrified of dying.

They should not be the ones making the decisions right now. They are compromised.

I've actually got my feet up on the edge of the hot tub right now.