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Comment by mycologos | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused by the number of upvotes this article has. It's a mishmash of innuendos and barely-related facts. I thought Lithub was a better website than this.

As far as I can tell, the narrative of this article is "the CIA did some real-world tests of how harmless bacterial spores propagate in a real-world environment; they also did closed-lab tests of how harmful bacterial droplets for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever propagate in a controlled environment among monkeys; a botched chemical weapons experiment ended US offensive chemical and bio warfare research; then a specific researcher had some family troubles, the end." It appears to be structured to imply that an outbreak of tick-born illnesses in Long Island in 1968 is not a coincidence.

Maybe the full book is a different story, but this seems like pretty bad conspiracy theoretic stringing together of tangential things.

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Not everything that makes you uncomfortable or embarrassed about your state is a conspiracy theory. Sometimes the state really does commit crimes on its populace, and in this particular case - where there's smoke, there's fire.

The CIA shouldn't be in the medical experiment business. Period. That citizens are willing to let it get away with murder is bad enough.

> Not everything that makes you uncomfortable or embarrassed about your state is a conspiracy theory.

This is a great thought-stopping cliche to prevent people from realizing they've bought into some dumb ideas.

"I can't be wrong, all of the people saying so are just ignorant hyper-patriots!"

Touché. As we who follow this subject know too well, every empirical dialectic has its antipode.

And in the middle we will meet, use our free and open societies properly, and provide justice to the victims of the most criminal group that ever existed on Earth.

We just need more eyeballs - conspiracy theorists or concerned fellow citizen, or otherwise - on the subject.

And that's precisely why shutting down the narrative is such an imperative. Nobody wants to really confront the most embarrassing crimes against humanity committed by their state, especially given they happen every twenty minutes or so, unhindered by democratic principles...

I agree that the CIA shouldn't be in the medical experiment business. There are good explanations of terrible things the CIA has done. But not every bad thing said about the CIA deserves credence simply by virtue of being a bad thing about the CIA.

The CIA is responsible for a LOT of bad things. This is not a conspiracy theory.

Therefore as an agency it should not be elevated in any way - it should, in fact, have to answer for these crimes - whether they were discovered and revealed by a conspiracy theorist, or by Congress itself. Often, one cannot proceed without the actions of the other...

They and other agencies are also involved in the psychological experiment business. Historically and probably currently. All the data they've got these days and various means to interact with their subjects is probably pretty wild.

Considering that the CIA is a highly secretive over-funded organization that was built by ex-Nazi's, these developments are indeed a matter of major concern, and one should not be dissuaded by the CIA's "conspiracy theorist" agitprop from investigating and prosecuting their vast and heinous crimes against humanity. Period.

> the CIA's "conspiracy theorist" agitprop

What's your actual claim here? "Everything anyone comes up with about the CIA is either true or invented by the CIA to make people think people like me are insane"? Do you think there's any room for honest weirdos to make idiotic claims about a famous entity? Because there's a well-characterized disease which induces people to do pretty much exactly that, and it's existed since long before the CIA, the OSS, or America were even conceived of.

I do not concur with this limited dialectic/materialist mode of thought.

Alas, conspiracies are not necessary - there is more than enough real evidence of the CIA having committed heinous crimes against humanity without having to resort to some sort of neurotic episode to describe it.

The characterization of the CIA as an honorable institution above reproach is just as fallacious as the idea that everyone who questions its actions is a nutcase.

As an organization the CIA has a very long and sordid well-known and documented history of committing acts that most reasonable people would find extremely difficult to justify - not so, the nationalists, who incidentally are also inflicted with a well-characterized mental disorder deserving treatment.

But whenever someone starts pulling on those threads of evidence to see where they lead, they are immediately confronted with the "conspiracy theorist" agitprop that is designed to stop further critical thought on the subject and protect the agency involved, which has after all spent billions shrouding itself in secrecy and subterfuge in order to protect itself from the democratic principles of justice that it works so hard to prevent its host society from effectively applying to itself.

"Honest weirdos" don't need to theorize. They need to prosecute in a free and open society, the very real war criminals and committers of crimes against humanity who have helmed the CIA and who have destroyed countless societies around the world in order to enact their vile ideology.

Just by way of a simple example, the fact that the American people haven't prosecuted Gina Haspel and sent her off to rot in chains in The Hague for her heinously vile torture programs is ample evidence that, indeed, the conspiracy theorists are all we have left...

> As an organization the CIA has a very long and sordid well-known and documented history of committing acts that most reasonable people would find extremely difficult to justify - not so, the nationalists, who incidentally are also inflicted with a well-characterized mental disorder deserving treatment.

Nationalism, while annoying, isn't a mental disorder, and we should refrain from medicalizing everything we disagree with, as that is certainly a trait of horrible organizations. (see: "sluggishly-progressing schizophrenia" in the USSR) Also, "they did bad things in the past so they did this specific bad thing" is a fallacy, or at least a jump into illogic: Just because someone stole a car doesn't mean they stole every car that got stolen in the past thirty years, or that they stole your car in specific. It doesn't follow.

> But whenever someone starts pulling on those threads of evidence to see where they lead, they are immediately confronted with the "conspiracy theorist" agitprop

They're not. You're stating something that's simply not the case.

Yes, the CIA has done horrible things. However, people who point this out aren't called crazy until they begin to say things like the CIA used nanothermite C4 to do 9/11 on the orders of the Jewish Reptilians, or that the CIA steals my thoughts and infects me with horrible compulsions. There's a line between known events and possible events, on one hand, and blatant nonsense, on the other.

>They're not. You're stating something that's simply not the case.

The "conspiracy theorist" label is what started this thread in the first place:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36994356

Let me add a pearl to that necklace (TL;DR: Morgellons disease is linked to Lyme disease):

> Exploring the association between Morgellons disease and Lyme disease: identification of Borrelia burgdorferi in Morgellons disease patients

> Morgellons disease (MD) is a complex skin disorder characterized by ulcerating lesions that have protruding or embedded filaments. Many clinicians refer to this condition as delusional parasitosis or delusional infestation and consider the filaments to be introduced textile fibers. In contrast, recent studies indicate that MD is a true somatic illness associated with tickborne infection, that the filaments are keratin and collagen in composition and that they result from proliferation and activation of keratinocytes and fibroblasts in the skin. Previously, spirochetes have been detected in the dermatological specimens from four MD patients, thus providing evidence of an infectious process.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5072536/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25879673/

Allow me to place the necklace around your neck now:

> Grossman added Kris Newby, an "excellent science writer connected to Stanford University," wrote a book in 2019 featuring interviews with Willy Burgdorfer, who is credited with the discovery of the microbe causing Lyme disease, and the book exposed that Burgdorfer had earlier "developed bioweapons for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)."

http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/25/c_1310146419.htm

The book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitten-History-Disease-Biological-Wea...

> As a science writer, she was driven to understand why this disease is so misunderstood, and its patients so mistreated. This quest led her to Willy Burgdorfer, the Lyme microbe’s discoverer, who revealed that he had developed bug-borne bioweapons during the Cold War, and believed that the Lyme epidemic was started by a military experiment gone wrong.

These aren't pearls. I'm going to just do one.

> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25879673/

This paper several authors with professional backgrounds that should make people skeptical.

* Three authors are from Australian Biologics. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has in the past "instituted proceedings in the Federal Court, Sydney, against Australian Biologics Testing Services Pty Ltd and its director, Ms Janette Burke [third author on this paper!], alleging that representations made in brochures and on Australian Biologics’ website in 2001 and part of 2002 were false, misleading, and deceptive" [1].

* Another author is Peter Mayne. In 2017 the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission prosecuted a complaint against him for "unsatisfactory professional conduct" because he "inappropriately diagnosing [a] patient with Lyme disease" and then, among other things, "[i]nappropriately treated the patient with weekly and then biweekly antibiotic injections for Lyme disease over approximately 30 weeks but failed to investigate or consider the patient might have cancer due to his age and medical history" and finally ordered him "[n]ot to advice [sic], diagnose or treat patients who he believes to have or may have Lyme disease or similar tick-borne disease" [2]

* Another author is Raphael B. Stricker, who the NIH found guilty of scientific misconduct in 1993 [3]

It is a red flag if a scientific field is this dense with people who have been found guilty of this kind of misconduct. Maybe being persecuted by an authority just adds fuel to the conspiracy, but I'm going to leave it at this: this strand of the chronic Lyme cottage industry (and maybe the industry in general) appears to be populated by people who either believe they themselves have chronic Lyme disease, or believe that they can make money off people who do. What it does not seem to have is disinterested third parties who are working on it because it's a meaningful research problem. This is a red flag, too: it suggests that there is something repelling people with reputations to lose, and I think it is the quality of research produced by its adherents.

Look, I believe these people are suffering, and suffering is bad, so I hope they get help, but I am very skeptical that the people claiming to offer help are the right people to do so.

Fine, one more thing. Willie Burgdorfer died in 2014, five years before Newby's book came out. He was 89 and died of complications from Parkinson's disease. The numbers for Parkinson's disease, dementia, and old age may, depending on the dates when Newby talked to him, make his testimony somewhat less than ironclad.

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-institutes-procee...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20230329100814/https://www.hccc....

[3] https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/not93-177.h...

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