Lies and secrets, secrets and lies. They always find a way to trickle out. Why we think we can make a big problem go by covering it up is beyond me. Nine times out of ten, the reason the drama is so fraught is because of the cover-up. If we would just attend to issues when they arise with logic, we'd all be a lot better off. But we're humans, we learn nothing.
Redditor u/Inflatabledartboard4 wanted to see who was willing to openly discuss about the times the "plan"... went completely off the rails by asking... What is the best example of a major cover-up backfiring?I can't tell you how many times in school I tried to devise cover ups to cover up cover ups. More often than not the planning and execution was a mess but the the stories themselves got so convoluted you'd think I was living in a film parody of The Matrix. Note to self... never steal you mother's jewelry and then try to pass it off as her new birthday present. SMH. I have no explanation or defense.
Never Gone
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Ex-UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi paid $175k to have the 2011 pepper spray incident removed from Google search results for the university, which brought the incident back into the public eye and was one of the scandals that eventually led to her resignation.
In the USSR
The soviet union trying to say that Chernobyl wasn't as big a deal as it actually was.
One of my grandparent's neighbors in Poland was a Belorussian guy from one of the closest towns to Chernobyl in Belarus. The Plant is basically on the Ukraine/Belarus border, and a huge amount of fallout happened in Belarus. No one was informed until everyone else was, even though they got almost as much fallout as Prypiat.
The way he describes it, they were across the border, so they didn't want to share. Even when they did, the Belarusian gov maintained the thought process that it wasn't a big deal, like the USSR was claiming. No one was to be relocated. He was a teenager at the time and left for Minsk as soon as he could because of how pissed off the whole thing made him.
His whole family stayed except for him, farming away while he was in the city and then moved to Poland after he met his Polish wife.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of his family died of cancer.
Dark Waters
The water crisis in Flint.
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha had been in touch with the Genesee Department of Health for months about Elevated Lead Levels (ELLs), and they went out of their way to obfuscate the data and make it seem like everything was normal. Dr. Hanna-Attisha brings in a research team from Virginia which shows that the ELLs are correlated with zip codes that recently switched water supplies.
They still ignore/deny what's happening. Finally, Dr. Hanna-Attisha says "f**k it", and holds a press conference telling people that their water is unsafe and to stop using it immediately.
A major public health crisis could have been mitigated if the public health officials spent more time doing their job and less time worrying about whether or not it pisses the governor off.
The Papers
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In 1973 the director of the CIA Richard Helms was worried that the watergate congressional investigations would spill over into investigations into the CIA so he ordered the destruction of all documents related to the MKUltra program.
20,000 documents were incorrectly stored with financial records and were not destroyed. They were later uncovered during an FOIA request and turned over to Congress.
Dodgers
Volkswagen and the emission dodging.
What was surreal was seeing thousands of them sitting in the parking lot of the Silverdome, the old Detroit Lion's stadium. I live just south of there and to see VWs mistake next to the derelict stadium was a trip. https://youtu.be/jJeYEnSD9G0.
Nevermind cover ups, those are some high crimes and misdemeanors. And so many plagued by tragic loss. Just so everyone knows... the Flint water is still poison. Let's continue...
The Graves
Katyn Massacre or Chernobyl.
Katyn Massacre: Red Army troops during WWII killed and buried 22,000 Polish officers. The German Army found this mass grave and asked the local SS Commander if it was his graves. The SS Commander said it wasn't his graves. The Red Army though insisted it was the Nazis that did it. Boris Yeltsin later admitted to grave in 1992.
Chernobyl: Basically, Chernobyl powerplant's reactor in the Ukraine in 1986 exploded and almost contaminated the whole of Europe. The USSR tried to cover it up, but Sweden detected the radiation from the fallout. Pripyat became a ghost town and the city of Chernobyl (the city the powerplant was powering) became semi deserted.
Lips Together and Blow...
Basically any case involving a dead about-to-be whistle blower. Killing someone is a good way to shut a person up. Its also a very good way of drawing attention to the person and what they had to say. The best way to cover something up is discredit the whistle blower.
Babs
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I guess the Streisand effect?
For those who don't know, someone took a photo of Barbara Streisand's Malibu home and posted it online.
The photo didn't get much attention until Barbara Streisand tried to have the photo blocked for the sake of her privacy
Upon hearing that Streisand wanted the photo removed, the image became forbidden fruit and was viewed millions of times across the internet.
If she hadn't tried to cover it up, no one would have looked.
Karen
In 1974, Karen Silkwood was found dead, as a result of a car crash. Silkwood was a chemical technician and labor union activist who was about the reveal the safety hazards. Despite drugs found on the scene, the police and coroner didn't believe the drug claim and went looking for other likely others. After being informed about death threats from her family, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the State Medical Examiner found radioactive contamination in her body.
This prompted an investigation at Kerr-McGee, the company Silkwood was talking about, which reveal the very problems that were about to going to be exposed to the media. Kerr-McGee had to pay up for what was done as they were held liable.
Oh Florida...
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Recent Polk County, Florida deputies losing (stealing) cash evidence, trying to cover it up, and getting fired.
What have we learned? Nothing right? Read again, just lead with the truth. It'll sting but as you can see... the other options will make it all much worse. This is particularly important for any future politicians following along. Don't be these guys.
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Typically, I would write an intro about my own experiences with the weird kids at school, but I WAS the weird kid in school. Not in a bad way, more like a “I had a John Waters phase” when I was 16 and everyone knew it. So like, cool-weird. At least I hope so.
Schools aren’t always so lucky to have the cool kinds of weird kids though. The spectrum of weird extends even further than that, and can sometimes end up very disasterous.
U/Imaginary_East5786 asked: What was the weirdest thing the weird kid did at school?
Let’s start with the grossest of the gross. Because why not.
Was it worth it?
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He heard that you'd automatically get suspended if you peed your pants at school. He wanted to find out if it was true, peed his pants, got suspended.
> Observation: 'I've heard that by peeing your pants you will be suspended'
> Hypothesis: If I pee my pants I will be suspended
> Experiment: I peed my pants and I got suspended
> Conclusion: If I pee my pants I get suspended
Uhhh what was the intention here?
He got mad that he didn't understand how to play a game at lunchtime so he started hitting and punching the nearest person to him, who happened to be me. When I shoved him away and asked him what the hell was he doing, he whipped his unit.out, charged at me and when I shoved him away from me again he started crying and ran away with his member still sticking out.
Next ones up are the lowkey (or even highkey) disturbing stories. These weird kids can get a little scary.
Boom theret.
At my middle school, someone decided to get a little attention with a good old fashioned bomb threat. Except they thought that a bomb threat meant literally writing "bomb threat" somewhere. Worse yet, they misspelled the f*ck out of it, and wrote "boom theret."
So we had to go on a brief, very awkward lockdown while the police checked the perimeter for booms.
I hope there was no overlap in the columns.
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She wrote a list of all the girls and boys she wanted to kiss and murder and then casually passed it out on the playground.
2 separate lists or just the 1?
Same list 2 columns lol.
Holy crap.
Had the weird kid in high school ask the teacher to use the bathroom. She said no and this dude legit stabbed his hand with a pencil. Went all the way through then asked if he could now...sh*t was wild.
This was Pearl High School in Mississippi. This was the school Luke Woodham shot and killed his girlfriend and her friend at the school. This kid stabbed himself with the pencil about 2 months after that happened. This was late 1997.
Most of the time, however, the weird kids are pretty d*mn funny.
Ok, but this takes a lot of skill.
Had a kid nicknamed "cheeseburger" in the grade ahead of me in high school. He got his nickname because when it was time for his class to go to lunch, he snuck into the roof and crawled his way into the cafeteria, dropped down and proceeded to steal all the cheeseburger put out for lunch. Unfortunately they caught him in the act and sent him to the principal's office.
A year later he was caught stealing a teacher's computer, and in the process of being arrested he bit the officers hand, getting him sent to juvi never to be heard of again.
Every school had the cat girl.
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The weird kid at my highschool tied a string around his pencil case and pulled out around the halls pretending it was a dog. He still lives in my hometown. I think unemployed.
Oh also weird girl in middle school acted like a cat. She would meow and hiss at people, lick the water fountain and rub her body on the teacher's legs. In 8th grade. I have no idea where she ended up.
Mood.
Weird kid in elementary was a self proclaimed alien. Once, while waiting for the bus, she told me "On my planet we eat people like you" and proceeded to bite me. We later became friends in high school and she used to give me massages during lunch break in the quad. Just realized now she was likely tenderizing me.
I was exactly this kind of weird.
He didn't say much, but if asked, he would go to the front of the class and perform Tip-Toe Through the Tulips with all of the emotion and volume of Tiny Tim, holding nothing back.
The last I heard, he became an energy trader, made a ton of money and married well.
I can definitely relate to that last one. In middle school, my English teacher would let me go to the front of the class and perform monologues or songs from Broadway musicals. Weird, but that’s what happens when schools cut funding for the arts and the theatre kids have no outlet.
As long as you’re not hurting anyone, I say let your freak flag fly, man