CLIMATE OF FEAR: PUTIN'S POTEMKIN APOCALYPSE

Three centuries ago, Grigory Potemkin kickstarted advertising by decorating a string of  riverside villages along the route of Catharine The Great's tour of her newly conquered Cossack lands along the Dniepr  One grew into the Ukrainian town of Zaporizhzhia, site of Europe's largest nuclear power plant, a six-pack of billion-watt reactors cooled by two giant towers and the river itself.

Now another great advertising genius, Vladimir Putin, has distracted the world from Ukraine's invasion of Kursk by once more making Zaporizhzhia a center of bamboozlement. 

Without an atom being split, Putin's PR shock troops have lit a giant diesel and tire fire on  the football field sized floor within one hollow concrete tower, creating a soot plume worthy of Chernobyl or Nagasaki.

While Anarchists like Bakunin viewed terror as the propaganda of the deed, Putin has gone with deep disinformation:  a tire pyre burning inside an idle cooling tower next to a shut-down nuclear reactor may be little more than a public nuisance, but  a video of it is enough of a smoke signal to scare the bejesus out of a billion TikTok viewers watching the soot rise on their cel phones.