An odd opportunity for development has cropped up here in the Town of Dunn, a rural island with a strict land use plan in an otherwise rapidly urbanizing county. The Federal Government has finally decided to close the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and replace it with an even more secure facility, the National Bio and Agro Defense Facility. The new facility will be located in America’s heartland.
I have mixed feelings. There are those that say that Lyme disease and West Nile Virus are escapees from Plum Island, and if that is true what sane, right thinking community member would want something like that in his township? But then there are those who say that development of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus was an offshoot of boy-in-a-bubble research funded by the Hughes Medical Foundation and undertaken by select academic institutions in the seventies and only escaped the lab in the eighties when the Reagan administration tried to legitimize the black ops, or at least turn them from black to gray at Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco. But what kind of nut ball would believe a thing like that? It would be as reasonable to think that the COINTELPRO operation targeting for death and “neutralization” the black Americans and other activists of the sixties was more than a figment of some liberal’s imagination.
I don’t think I have much to be concerned about as regards the laboratory being sited here. Texas A&M, home of the Bush Presidential Library, the school where Robert Gates — former CIA Director, Iran Contra alumnus and now nominee for Secretary of Defense — was president is on the list of institutions competing for the prize. Texas A&M has great relations with the Hughes Medical Institute and Texas itself is a much better location than Wisconsin from which to mount a germ warfare offensive against enemies of the American Oligarchy. And Texas is more the heartland than Wisconsin. We are more the bellybutton-land, or perhaps the armpit-land.
My best wishes to all the folks who are competing for these research dollars. It’s just too bad everyone can’t be a winner.
I’ve seen polities come pretty close to a ponderous sort of common sense, but boy was it ever resented. So much so that the putative heirs to the effort fell all over each in a rush to grab some of the social capital market share for denouncing the “excesses” of, say, the Church Commission.
Authoritarianism encourages a magical evidentiary epistemology. Exponents of an auditable means for securing a bit of safety against carelessness, greed and the odd gang of charismatic, plausibly enculturated sociopaths have an uphill fight against that. The process of whittling away at falsehoods ruins the splendid cases built up in the heads of jovial simpletons. So of course it’s resented.
A Bush or a Reagan comes along and says we must build a pyramid of dog feces. A clever Clinton comes by to say it must be perfumed, and feels the pain of people crushed by the perfume tankers. The media ensures both sides get a hearing, smugly certain that the hegelian process they sponsor will harvest ad revenue.
It’s just not right, Frank.
great link, Scruggsie