51 Sailors from USS Ronald Reagan Suffering Thyroid Cancer, Leukemia, Brain Tumors

[MisterP]

32. last I saw they were panicking about Montessori schooling

but seriously there's still this relict counter-Counterculture bunker-mentality panic in a lot of these pronouncements, fed from the student upheaveals of 1966-73--the barbarians were at the gates and, even worse, they were our own children and students; this antique vision is kept going by a "closed discourse community" of "science defenders"

everything from social history to the New Age and Dooobie Brothers put them in quite a panic that they've never gotten over: Shirley MacLaine, Michel Foucault, Jerry Falwell, Abbie Hoffmann, Donna Haraway, and just mainstream religion in general form some sort of self-contradictory hydra bearing the name Irrationalism; just as they ascribed Pol Pot's victory to Cambodian fears of a naga living under Phnom Penh (I shit you not) America was about to topple into a new Dark Ages, the candles would all gutter and go out, the bombs would fall, and anyone literate would be lynched for it: even pharmacists were doffing their white coats, going into the jungle, and asking those naked savages what plants they used--traitors within the ranks!

Monsanto, McDonnell-Douglas, and the Hanford Reservation have long had experience in massaging not just the numbers but the science itself--they'd always delay autopsies before Geigering the body, or bragged about how little *gamma* radiation was escaping--and most of all anyone questioning these cost-plus padded budgets, unprofitable nuclear industries, and feeding the sparrows through the horse were not only threatening national strength but about to topple Mankind from its course, to end Progress towards infinite abundance and a material godhood that'd make Revelations look like a crayon drawing: it's the spirit that lets PRTs and Hyperloops and Moller SkyCars be treated seriously, the nuclear hand grenade and the Penny for NASA