Sparsely populated, beautiful scenery, low prices

I think I found a big piece of uninhabited land that I'm sure would sell for next to nothing. Here's some pictures taken by a recent visit this past spring.

Is it me, or is it getting all Call-of-Duty up in this piece?

Bearing Arms

No, I don't mean firearms, medieval arms, or anything of the like. I'm talking Arms of the strategic type, with a couple of tactical ones thrown in for good measure.

Now, I really want you to check out the pictures in this thread regarding nuclear weapons. Seriously, go on and look at it. The next time you look at your grandfather, think of the batshit crazy ideas his generation had when designing this stuff. Then think of how you would feel as a nineteen year old Army trooper carrying a tactical nuke on your back, and then setting it up and launching it at an enemy that you can see with the naked eye. Maybe back then they had no idea that they were exposing themselves to massive amounts of radiation in several forms, or maybe they did and didn't care. With that sort of stuff - radiation exposure, I mean - there are things associated with it that can be worse than death, like a very very slow and painful death, or even having a penis sprout out of your forehead to the laughter of your friends. But it's no laughing matter.

Browsing through the pictures I can definitely see where GI Joe came from. All of the futuristic, half-human cyborg soldiers shooting lazer beams at one another doesn't seem all that far fetched now. The Ohio class submarines are both terrifying and awesome as hell at the same time, and I'm thankful that a group of demented scientists and engineers came up with the idea while hanging out at the water cooler one day at work.

Demented Engineer - "Hey Earl, you reckon we ought to come up with something really deadly to counter the Reds? I just don't think the tanks can get it done."

Evil Scientist - "By golly Sam, I think you may be onto something! If we could harness the power of the sun by splitting atoms, we could put it in some sort of clever technical device that can deliver it to those damned commies. Then we would be unstoppable!"

Demented Engineer - "I'm liking your zeal, Earl! If we took all that powerful scientific bullshit that you just came up with and stuffed it into a humongous tube, we could stow like fifty of them on a submersible ship that would then be capable of destroying the entire world! It would be great!!"

Evil Scientist - "And then we could put some of my scientific bullshit in something smaller, such as one of those right circular cylindrical devices you were pontificating about, one that would be portable enough for one of those warfighter drones to carry into battle."

Demented Engineer - "That would clean up the rest of the Reds that survived the evil holocaust. Good thinking; now let's get to work!"

Having been on a few military bases myself - some of them so spooky that I walked around with every hair on my body standing up, blading 45 degrees towards anyone I came across - I can only imagine how many dudes in white labcoats are busy at work, protractors and calculators in hand, designing crazy stuff that we haven't even heard of yet. Scary huh? What could possibly be more badass than an underwater ship carrying more ordnance than was dropped in WWII?!?!

There's an Ap for that

Cellphones that detect Chemical and Biological warfare agents? Really?

It will make everyone like Syndrome from The Incredibles!

This is a piss poor idea for like a thousand different reasons. Just to name a few - Chem/Bio detectors are notorious for false positives; having a phone that constantly updates "authorities" is a terrible idea that doesn't even need to be explained; and even if the phone can accurately detect vapors from GB amongst all that Drakkar Noir that you hosed yourself down with, you would be dead before the phone hit the floor.

But hey, who doesn't want a James Bond phone, right?

Is that smell coming from your dirty arsenic?

So, apparently America's best and brightest from about seven or eight decades ago didn't exercise any good judgment at all in the use and disposal of some really scary shit; they should have been more cautious.

There is a definite trend in how chemical and biological agents have been treated from their inception to the present, and that trend can be sized up as either complete recklessness, blissful ignorance, or malice. To know that you have been entrusted with public property that is of the highest danger to mankind, and then just bury it in the ground and quietly retire requires a little bit of all three.

Let's recap so that we have visibility:

• In the case of Spring Valley, scientists from Ft. Detrick thought it was safe to take chemicals that were known to them to be of high lethality and bury them in shallow pits at random and not keep track of where those sites were. That, and they didn't even bother containing them in anything, they buried them in glass jars and mortar rounds and such like they had just scooped them off a table and dropped them in a hole. At least secure them in something that stays watertight for awhile, and won't break when struck with a shovel.
• Generations of scientists at Ft. Detrick were trusted to work with the planet's most toxic biological agents, and none of them thought it was a good idea to maybe keep track of how much agent they had on hand because they were too lazy and stupid to defrost the freezers where the agents were kept. "Fuck! When the hell is that lazy janitor gonna clean up in here!?!? This fridge looks like a pig sty!" No ledgers; no restricted access to the freezers; no accountability; no simple upkeep - Fail.
• Scientists were entrusted to work with blister agent, arsenic, and who knows what else at American University, and they thought that the best way to wrap up their work and protect their community was to bury the live bombs, mortars, and shells, as well as glass beakers full of agent, into shallow unmarked pits around the campus. It worked out great!
• US government agents that were entrusted with chemical and biological agents thought it would be best to find out how they worked by surreptitiously dosing the US military, the American public, and foreign citizens with them. "Wow! Holy smokes is that stuff contagious! Didja see that shit! Hey, how about a beer to celebrate our hard work!"
• Our president has opened the doors to the amount of people in the military industrial complex who have access to these things in the hopes that research will win the day; and nobody seems to have given the thought to history and how this stuff was treated in the past.
  

If you work in the military industrial world, I want you to stop what you are doing right now and quietly peek over your cubicle and look at the guy next to you . . . . . yes, the hungover gentleman or lady who doesn't bathe, collects cats that look like Hitler, and still plays D&D with their pet cockatoo. Now imagine that person coming in to work in the morning after a long night of arguing with their ex who's out on parole, putting on a level A protective suit and pulling a glass jar of hemorrhagic fever out of the freezer that the janitors of yore have neglected to clean out, and getting to work. Now, think of the word trust. Puts things in a different light, huh? Would you trust that person to be responsible enough to dispose of that hemorrhagic fever in a way that wouldn't effect your neighborhood? Do you think the government is a responsible enough trustee to ensure that Mrs. Level 21 Eternal Seeker properly disposes of the hemorrhagic fever, and doesn't accidentally pour it into her Star Trek thermos and take it home?

Me neither.

I thought it might be useful to catalog some of this stuff since the media seems content to just post a two paragraph article about it. There's a sexting scandal at a school right now, you know, so there's much more important things going on to waste the space. Fortunately, I have plenty.

No. Way.

Seriously? The CIA may have experimented with chemical agents on people? I am both shocked and outraged at the same time.

"People were starting to hit each other, people were insulting one another, people were screaming. It was very serious," Paul Pages, who was 26 years old at the time, told ABC News. "There was a young guy who jumped out of a hospital window after screaming 'Look, I'm a dragonfly'. He broke both of his legs," Pages remembered. "The postman was also seen zigzagging on his bike. He eventually fell. He had lost his reason."

What would give anyone get the idea that the US government would be so reckless as to test chemical warfare agents on unsuspecting people? That just can't possibly be. Stupid people and their stupid conspiracy theories.

The more reasonable explanation is that this was the work of the Illuminati trying to make it seeeeeeem like it was the US in an effort to draw the French into a war that would bring untold profits to several secretive elites hell bent on enslaving the poor. Or, the CIA may have just been testing chemicals on the French. Your call.

Landscaping becoming a dangerous career in North West DC

Nothing like the prospect of having your kids dig up a bottle of Lewisite in the back yard to drive property values up. If you're the kind of person who won't be digging around planting petunias in your backyard, I hear Spring Valley offers some lovely property!

Ahh, the sweet aroma of mustard. Just another reminder of all those days in the trenches in France. You can enjoy the privacy of 24/7 access to the conveniently located drop box at the investigation office trailer where you can anonymously drop off those old chemical mortar rounds that you hit with the lawnmower before heading off to work.

And personally, I prefer arsenic added to my drinking water to give it a bit of spiciness. Studies show that it helps with child development too! Perfect!

Seriously though, I understand that this massive government screwup happened like seventy something years ago, but I am stunned to believe that even back then people were so stupid as to randomly bury ordnance.

Dr. Vern - "Hey Bill, what the hell do we do with all these chemical warfare munitions? There's thousands of them!"

Agent Bill - "Man, I don't know. . . .that shit is super deadly. I don't want to touch em. Didga see what that stuff did to Bob? Melted his skin right to the bone!"

Dr. Vern - "I reckon the safe and responsible thing to do with them then is to go ahead and bury them in dozens of shallow unmarked pits."

Agent Bill - "Right! I'll cover them up with the ledgers as an added layer of protection; the American public shouldn't have to loose any sleep by knowing how much of this stuff we safely buried."

Dr. Vern - "Go ahead and throw in all those fragile glass beakers too! Might as well make those safe while we're at it!"

Agent Bill - "You're a genious Vern! Someday, many years from now, citizens of this city will thank us for our unbending commitment to providing safe government service by not gaffing off the disposal of all these deadly blister agent bombs! You can count on that!"

This sort of thinking seems to be rampant around the nation's capitol.

MMMmmmmm. . . .mustard!!

But it's no grey poupon.

Finding a beaker full of mustard (HD) is not encouraging to a population who just wants the nightmare to end.

Back in the day we (the U.S., not me) were a little too cavalier about giving access of chemical and biological weapons to whomever, and these days we seem to be forgetting the lessons learned from the past.

The results will probably be the same.

Clean out your refridgerator

Ft. Detrick, MD did, and what they found was arguably more icky than anything found in the fridge under your cubicle.

The 13 percent overage mainly reflects stocks left behind in freezers by researchers who retired or left Fort Detrick since the biological warfare defense program was established there in 1943, said Col. Mark Kortepeter, deputy commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

He said the found material included Korean War-era serum samples from patients with Korean hemorrhagic fever, a disease still of interest to researchers pursuing a vaccine. Other vials contained viruses and microbes responsible for Ebola, plague, anthrax, botulism and host of other ailments, Kortepeter said in a teleconference with reporters.

Holy smokes!! These guys are saying that it's, like, super easy to overlook vials of deadliness because of all the ice chunks in the freezer and stuff! "Look, it's not our fault!! There's CLUTTER in there for pete's sake!!" Maybe you should not wait sixty six years to clean the things out; not to mention conducting a "spot check" every, like, decade or so to see if, oh I dunno, any of the worlds most deadly toxins are missing? Did you ever think of that!!??!!

And these guys are supposed to be our best and brightest. No wonder they still live at mom's so she can do their laundry.

You don't reckon anybody took some of this stuff home with them at some point in time, do ya?

More scary stuff:

Kortepeter said the inventory found nothing missing from about 70,000 items the institute began cataloging in 2005. He said Army criminal investigators have concluded that three vials of Venezuelan equine encephalitis that were discovered missing last year "were likely used up but for some reason were never recorded with the database."

Yeah. "Except for the 3 vials of VEE, every thing's accounted for!!" So what about the sixty two years of time between when the VEE was "likely" used up and when the Biological Program started? Was anything from the inventory found missing then?

Keep in mind that there are several more facilities like this throughout the country. Are you telling me that nobody in the DoD chain of command, or anyone who work(s)(ed) at the facility during all this time thought to maybe keep a ledger of what went in and out of these freezers?

This is why I think that instead of throwing open the doors to thousands more personnel that have access to these materials, access should instead be cut waaaay back. This is not the field of work to have a mishap where some absent minded professor has a moment of question: "Damn! Where did I place that Igloo cooler of Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever? I must have left it on the bus."