>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.
The USSR was a threat to U.S. domination of the world. The internal Communist movement was once a threat to American capitalism. People may valorize that threat in different ways - myself, though no fan of the USSR, I miss having something to counter U.S. power and to support Third World revolutions - but the "threat" wasn't a pure phantasm, nor a product of the arms industry's lobbying.
> >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.
Let me quote from the U.S. CDC again <http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/diseases/cjd/bse_cjd_qa.htm>:
>There is strong epidemiologic and laboratory evidence for a causal
>association between new variant CJD and BSE. The absence of
>confirmed cases of new variant CJD in other geographic areas free of
>BSE supports a causal association.
There seems to be a disagreement between you & the scientists here.
Doug