House Orders Pentagon To Say if it Weaponized Ticks and Released Them (rollcall.com) 190
The House quietly voted last week to require the Pentagon inspector general to tell Congress whether the department experimented with weaponizing disease-carrying insects and whether they were released into the public realm -- either accidentally or on purpose. From a report: The unusual proposal took the form of an amendment that was adopted by voice vote July 11 during House debate on the fiscal 2020 defense authorization bill, which lawmakers passed the following day. The amendment, by New Jersey Republican Christopher H. Smith, says the inspector general "shall conduct a review of whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975." If the answer is yes, then the IG must provide the House and Senate Armed Services committees with a report on the experiments' scope and "whether any ticks or insects used in such experiments were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experiment design."
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If there is enough of any type of work that it should require automation, then th
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Monopolies are bad. Not only is the government a monopoly within a certain jurisdiction, but it's the worst kind: A monopoly that is violently imposed rather than voluntarily grown or just voluntarily maintained (if you even try to compete, they'll literally kill you).
So your proposal is to extend the dysfunctions of markets into the most basics things in life? Instead of a monopoly under the strict control of the population, you get...what, another emergent monopoly from consolidation, but this time under the control of profit-seeking shareholders? Oh my.
The best shape of society must be found through Evolution by Variation and Selection, the most robust and humane form of which is a free market (law by contracts; voluntary trade), which transforms competition into well defined cooperation to try different approaches for solving problems; variation is provided by supplier competition, and selection is provided by consumer choice.
I believe we call this "having multiple countries".
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Ugh, whenever anyone starts talking about the "invisible hand" I throw up a little in my mouth. The "invisible hand" is simple emergent behavior. There is nothing magical there that makes markets self correcting. It's been shown, time and time again, that markets left completely unregulated actually tend to crash and burn horribly. Then they pick themselves up and dust themselves off and get back to work, then crash and burn horribly again.
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" police, fire departments, hospitals, courts and judges, sewagr pipes, water pipes, gas pipes, the electicity grid, public transportation, education"
Wrong taxes. These come from the county or state not "the state" as in the federal state.
"sick leave and maternaty leave"
Aren't even paid for with taxes. These things are paid for privately... by the employee in actual practice since the company sure as hell doesn't forego profits for these things it reduces labor costs to offset them. Sometimes paid time off
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Re: Why are we paying these creeps again? (Score:1)
In that case, thank god that tax dollars will never, ever be spent on tyranny, slavery, war, and bloodshed.
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Coming from some anonymous little shitfuck behind a keyboard who, incidentely, has never personally suffered slavery, tyranny, war, and bloodshed. Tell me, worthless keyboard warrior, why is that ? Is it because the country you live in is one of your libertarian utopia ? I think not.
But go ahead, continue to post anonymously so you can mod me down again. Funny, I tought libertarians and right-wingers in general were the champions of anti-censorship and free-speech defense. I guess they're also the champions
Here's a history lesson: (Score:1)
United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases [wikipedia.org]
Re:Here's a history lesson: (Score:5, Interesting)
"The Long-suppressed Korean War Report on U.S. Use of Biological Weapons Released At Last"
https://www.globalresearch.ca/... [globalresearch.ca]
"Read Long-Suppressed Official Report On US Biological Warfare In North Korea"
https://shadowproof.com/2018/0... [shadowproof.com]
"Unit 731 – A U.S. Cover-Up of Cruelty"
https://www.topsecretwriters.c... [topsecretwriters.com]
"A Preliminary Review of Studies of Japanese Biological Warfare Unit 731 in the United States "
http://www.fepow-community.org... [fepow-community.org.uk]
"Department of Justice Official Releases Letter Admitting U.S. Amnesty of Japan’s Unit 731 War Criminals"
https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/... [medium.com]
"US Secret Laboratories Are Spread Worldwide And Work To Develop Biological Weapons"
https://www.healththoroughfare... [healththoroughfare.com]
"The Pentagon Bio-weapons"
http://dilyana.bg/the-pentagon... [dilyana.bg]
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Jeffrey Kaye did excellent work on the use of biological and chemical weapons against North Korea.
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Are there any gay frogs? If so, were they born that way?
Why are you singling out French gays, some kind of fetish?
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Yes, and No. Republicanism has that effect on frogs. Apparently it makes bulls shit too.
So you're back to worrying about deficits, debt eh (Score:3, Informative)
The recently deposed Republican majority increased the federal debt by $7.9 trillion in the eight years it controlled the House of Representatives.
At the close of business on Jan. 4, 2011, the day before the Republicans took control of the House, the debt was $14,014,049,043,294.41, according to the Treasury.
On Jan. 3, 2019, the last day before the Republicans turned control of the House back to the Democrats, the debt closed at $21,929,258,046,653.58.
So, under the Republican House majorities in four Congre
Re:So you're back to worrying about deficits, debt (Score:5, Interesting)
You Americans - I just can't decide whether to laugh, cry, or try to forget all about you.
Long ago your "government" was hijacked by corporate criminals.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/... [princeton.edu]
Yet year after year you persist in arguing which of the two masks the same criminals wear is responsible for your troubles.
Listen: they are all in it together! This is not news. Decades ago, Gore Vidal - sent to you by God as a great prophet, and like all great prophets ignored in his own land - explained it in simple words.
"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt – until recently and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties".
Nothing important has changed since he wrote that. For anyone who cares, here is a little more detail.
"By directly pitting the predictions of ideal-type theories against each other within a single statistical model (using a unique data set that includes imperfect but useful measures of the key independent variables for nearly two thousand policy issues), we have been able to produce some striking findings. One is the nearly total failure of “median voter” and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy...
"Nor do organized interest groups substitute for direct citizen influence, by embodying citizens’ will and ensuring that their wishes prevail in the fashion postulated by theories of Majoritarian Pluralism. Interest groups do have substantial independent impacts on policy, and a few groups (particularly labor unions) represent average citizens’ views reasonably well. But the interest-group system as a whole does not. Overall, net interest-group alignments are not significantly related to the preferences of average citizens. The net alignments of the most influential, business-oriented groups are negatively related to the average citizen’s wishes...
"What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it".
- Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”
https://www.cambridge.org/core... [cambridge.org]
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Oh, a few minutes' searching turned up this:
"United States Biological Warfare during the Korean War: rhetoric and reality"
https://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/... [yorku.ca]
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the paper ends with the following statement:
"Note: this article has been offered to several scholarly journals with a view to publication, but so far none have made a positive response. (June 2004)".
Well, waddaya know?
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"Whatever the problem, solve it with fire!" -- Magical Kyoko
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Re: So you're back to worrying about deficits, deb (Score:1)
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Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it
And this is why Trump was elected. It was the only way to throw a wrench into the system. ... just an observation.
Trump just blew the security money on a parade. (Score:2, Informative)
Literally, the DC antiterror response fund was drained to parade tanks through DC on a rainy day, much to the chagrin of actual Americans who know this kind of shit makes us look like morons who forgot our own father's birthplace..
And of course you want to pretend this is all someone else's fault. Of course you do, Republicans. That's literally all you can do now, as you cheer on a nationalist disgrace as he wipes his obese treasonous ass with our laws and Constitution.
Whether or not bioweapons have been
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Literally, the DC antiterror response fund was drained to parade tanks through DC on a rainy day, much to the chagrin of actual Americans who know this kind of shit makes us look like morons who forgot our own father's birthplace..
And of course you want to pretend this is all someone else's fault. Of course you do, Republicans. That's literally all you can do now, as you cheer on a nationalist disgrace as he wipes his obese treasonous ass with our laws and Constitution.
Whether or not bioweapons have been released into the wild is a job for oversight. You don't agree with oversight. This much we know already - you're the ticks.
And Trump got all you "progressive" wankers to attack the US - burning US flags on July 4.
All by throwing a parade, he got "progressives" to openly reveal their true colors.
You just don't know what to do about someone who doesn't bend his knee to "progressive" false accusations, do you? Remember how Mitt Romney was going to literally put blacks in chains? [cbsnews.com]
That's how you got Trump - all you have is some variation of YOU RAAAACIS'!!!! and nobody outside of the brain-dead, useful-idiot "progressive" echo cha
Re:The House is a useless body (Score:5, Interesting)
The US has a crisis at the border and an ever increasing $22T+ debt, but what is the House voting on? Ticks.
Useless?
Look, there is credible evidence that lyme disease was part of a weponds program (released at Ft. Detrick). I live in ground zero for lyme, and know several people who are pretty severely disabled by it. Hmm. And yes, I'm pretty close to Ft. Detrick.
So, in the name of transparency, don't you think we should know if 10's of thousands of people have been sickened by a government biological warfare experiment?
If you define that as useless, I really don't know what to say, other than perhaps you're not really up to where you need to be for democracy to work.
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A time travelling weapons programme?
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Does that preclude any kind of bio warfare research? Nobody ever tried to weaponize existing diseases...
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The border crisis? You mean the "caravan" that just suddenly disappeared when it wasn't needed for the election anymore.
There is no border crisis. It's just part of Trumps rhetoric so that his voters have something to fear and that he has something to blame for his shortcomings.
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To be clear, the Democrats think that there's a humanitarian crisis in the treatment of human beings detained in ICE facilities. The Republicans think that the crisis is people trying to come to the US, even by legal means.
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"The Republicans think that the crisis is people trying to come to the US, even by legal means."
Even legal means??? This is the first that I've heard of that one.
Republicans asked for billion dollar funding to help with the humanitarian problem within ICE facilities. They wanted more beds and funding for better conditions. Democrats voted no. How can you say that democrats see it as a humanitarian issue if they aren't doing anything humane to help? They just point fingers and let the problem get worse. That
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I do hope you are not attempting irony. Hardly anyone on /. understands it, and of that tiny minority some pretend not to.
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The House is a useless body?
Yeah well, who made it that way?
And another thing, ticks are a real hazard, weaponized or not...
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The US has a crisis at the border and an ever increasing $22T+ debt, but what is the House voting on? Ticks.
There are ticks... and ticks.
If you were bitten by one of those ticks, you would be very sorry you were born.
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Umm, no. I'm outdoors a lot in the summer and occasionally I've been bitten by lone star ticks, deer ticks, and spotted ticks, but suffered no ill effects. According to my doctor, you usually run the risk of some type of infection if the tick stays on you for three days or more. Just check yourself after going outdoors even if you're using anti-insect repellent and you'll likely be OK.
It's not what tick bites you. It's what the tick is infected with or not. I know several people who have been fighting debilitating cases of Lyme's disease for years, and a red "bullseye" rash surrounding the bite within the first several days was their first sign. Then it proceeded to invade their body and compound on other ailments in ways that has been ruining their lives since. They have not been served well by the medical establishment, and I question the lack of serious care this disease gets.
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For fuck's sake, there is no "crisis" at the border. Only desperate people with nothing more to lose, simply wanting a better future for their children, and ready and able to take the jobs that you lazy, entitled little spoiled brats refuse to take.
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No, the US should stop making their lives hell in Central America.
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Look at the dates the date is requested to cover.
(OTOH, after WWII the US government imported a bunch of Nazis and put them in important positions...so your basic point is valid.)
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All funding requests are required to be initiated in the House. I'm not at all sure the government adheres to this part of the constitution, but it's there.
The main reason I'm dubious about it is that the Executive branch has a long history of shuffling funds about.
It's called Entomological warfare (Score:5, Interesting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomological_warfare/ [wikipedia.org]
Tell it to Bob, traitors. (Score:1)
“'Charging the president with a crime was an option we could not consider,” Mueller said.
“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller added.
“We did not however make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.”
Mueller said “it would be unfair” to accuse someone with a crime who can’t defend himself at trial, emphasizing that he was following a Justice Department policy aga
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Jesus... (Score:4, Interesting)
They really did, didn't they?
This isn't the sort of fever-dream someone just comes up with and it makes it to the house floor. This short of shit with this sort of detail generally comes from inside knowledge.
So, anyone want to start taking bets on which one it is? https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/dise... [cdc.gov]
I've got $20 on Ehrlichiosis.
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Please give me $20
Ostfeld: There was a man at a public event where I was speaking a few years ago who, in the question and answer session, pontificated about how the Lyme disease bacterium was created by the CIA at Plum Island as a biowarfare weapon — which if you know anything about this bacterium is absolutely ludicrous. It would be the stupidest biowarfare weapon you could possibly imagine. In any event, I said that this was actually not true, the DNA of this bacterium has been amplified in museum
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>this bill isn't about Lyme disease
Yeah it is
[New Jersey Republican Christopher H.] Smith, a founding co-chairman of the Congressional Lyme Disease Caucus, which advocates for greater awareness of the disease and for more funding for research into a cure.
Pat Smith, president of the Lyme Disease Association, said in an interview Monday that she is hopeful the IG report could provide information that could save lives.
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Thank goodness that nothing 13,000 years old could possibly be used as a weapon.
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There have been numerous claims of the USA using infected insects during the Korean war.
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That's the wrong time period...unless what you're asserting is that this is a continuing event, in which case why the cut-off date?
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I've actually had Ehrlichiosis and it was crazy hard to get diagnosed correctly. I was basically dying in an isolation suite in the hospital, while the physicians mused over what it could be at rounds every day.
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Lab right across the river from Fire Island NY.
They think that's where lymes came from.
There has to be a special place in hell for someone that developed that. Crucifixion is too good of a punishment for them and that is probably the most brutal, painful way to go if it's done right.
People are stupid. (Score:2, Informative)
Tick researchers have refuted this myth that the military created Lyme disease or were responsible for its spread here: https://elemental.medium.com/what-its-like-to-be-a-creepy-crawler-field-researcher-32c635338989
> What’s the strangest sort of question you have to handle?
> Keesing: The conspiracy theory that the government made the Lyme bacterium, that’s gotta be up there. I mean, really?
> Ostfeld: There was a man at a public event where I was speaking a few years ago who, in the ques
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That guy lacked imagination: another ancient frozen corpse was found earlier and was kept in storage until the technology existed to weaponise the bacterium. Then they got in their time machine and went back in time (which is how they knew they had to store the corpse in the first place, duh) so the events of Plum Island could take place just as he said
It was all classified at Cosmic level as part of the Illuminati plot that has been in operation since the Rosicrucians started inbreeding the children of Jes
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What's a couple of legs between military friends?
Arachnids are NOT a type of insects. (Score:2)
Not in any biology book I ever read. Insecta has a bunch of characteristics. Arthropoda is the phylum that joins them with arachnids.
Arachnida -> Chelicerata -> Arthropoda
somesubgroup -> Insecta ->Arthropoda
Illegal Under BWC (Score:2)
Re:Illegal Under BWC (Score:5, Informative)
This type of work is illegal under the Biological Weapons Convention [wikipedia.org] ratified by the US.
BWC was signed in 1972, and TFS says they're interested in happenings between 1950 and 1975, so most of what they're looking for wouldn't be covered by it.
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This type of work is illegal under the Biological Weapons Convention [wikipedia.org] ratified by the US.
Who cares?
Do you really think Russia and China abide by those silly treaties?
No, of course not. They will continue to research and make killer biological weapons.
Only feel good fools think these treaties curb anything.
We have an Ticknado! (Score:3)
We have an Ticknado!
Why the date limits ? (Score:3)
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but why stop looking after 1975
Prior to 1975, we needed a subtle yet pervasive, scaleable delivery system to "apply toxins." Insects, of course were the perfect answer (Domo arigato, Unit 731). Now, however, they - quite willingly - eat what we call "food."
No more bugs needed - except in the forthcoming McBug Burger.
They're missing out (Score:4, Funny)
Who cares about ticks being weaponized? The real question is, did they cross ebola with the common cold virus? That would be a terrible, terrible thing.