>When it comes to imperialism, imperialist governments lie a lot; it's
>in the interest of the state and the class it works for. I don't see
>what the U.S. government would gain by lying about BSE/nvCJD.
My mistake, I read your source quickly and assumed it was a UK gov't one. I am assuming that the source of the source is the UK gov't.
I don't think that the BSE/CJD panic is a deliberate and rational policy. But then neither is the crime panic. It is, to the contrary, irrationality raised to a higher level. But then that's capitalism, no?
>About
>the last thing U.S. capital or its political class would like is a
>British-style beef panic. Or maybe I'm wrong - what interest would be
>served by a crisis in the U.S. food industry? Is George W Bush
>secretly a member of PETA?
British capital and its political class didn't *want* a beef panic, but they still managed to manufacture one.
By all means let's go into the mechanics of how panics happen. But don't just rubbish anything that disturbs the received opinion of the moment. By that method, you would have taken the Soviet Threat as good coin, before asking what was driving the Cold War.
>
>For someone who professes a great belief in science, James, you're
>very selective about which scientific evidence you'll believe.
On the contrary. It's the absence of scientific evidence that screams out at you in the BSE-CJD association - as the material you cited shows. Not one person yet has come up with a plausible explanation of how BSE jumps from one species to another, other than that both are diseases carried by prions. Not a few of those who have died of CJD were vegetarians, after all.
-- James Heartfield