Where Your Taxes Go:
Puppets, Pheromones And Pure Lunacy
Back in the 1990s, the U.S. Air Force was apparently rabid to develop an aerosolized chemical
that could be sprayed on enemy forces to make then gay.
There is a fairly agonizing transformation currently unfolding in our government. Perhaps you’ve read about it. Elon Musk and his marauding band of autistic geniuses are taking a chainsaw to the federal budget. The carnage is predictably gory. For my part, I couldn’t be happier.
I pay quite a lot in taxes myself. Some folks are addicted to alcohol, opiates or sex. I was born with a tragic and irresistible addiction to hard work.
I got my driver’s license on my 15th birthday. The following day, I got a job. I have been working and paying taxes pretty much every day since. The epiphany that I could convert my time into money that I could then use to buy guns and ammunition was fairly transformative for me.
As a result, I have long since come to appreciate the intrinsic value of things. My money is a quantifiable measure of my time and toil. When I am forced to pay an astronomical percentage of the fruits of my labors to the government, I’d honestly just as soon they spend that treasure on something awesome like killing terrorists. Tragically, that has not always been the case.
It seems to me that the U.S. Air Force would be better served if
they constrained themselves to stuff they know well, like how
to maintain and employ this B2 Spirit stealth bomber.
Seriously?
Mr. Musk’s efforts have been illuminating, to say the least. You and I dropped a cool $20 million to create an Iraqi version of Sesame Street. Personally, I could accumulate a pretty decent collection of silly Arab puppets for that kind of coin. We spent $3 million on “girl-centered climate action” in Brazil, whatever that actually is.
It seems we have also supported terrorists, funded sex-change operations in foreign lands, and generally made idiots of ourselves by means of the profligate distribution of hard-earned American tax dollars. I personally think Elon is doing the Lord’s Work. May the wind be ever at his back.
We Americans make the finest weapons in the history of warfare. We make quite a lot of them as well. I have read that if you took everything we spent on defense from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War, you could raze and rebuild every manmade structure in North America. As much as I did personally relish flying those sexy-cool combat aircraft for Uncle Sam back in the day, even I think that might be a bit much.
The majority of that frankly astronomical expenditure went to legitimate stuff like 5.56mm ammo, B52 bombers, MREs and jet fuel. However, you toss around that kind of cheddar, and some of it will undoubtedly end up squandered on things of dubious effectiveness. One of those was the “Gay Bomb.”
The Mission
We actually dumped $7.5 million trying to develop a way to deliver aerosolized pheromones in such a way as to create unbridled homosexual attraction among enemy combatants. Curiously, this seems the sort of thing they might have undertaken by the Nazis back in the 1930s. However, this tidy bit of hysterical pseudoscience took place in 1994. I can only imagine what the business cards looked like.
This research was spearheaded by the rocket surgeons at the Wright Laboratory at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside of Dayton, Ohio. The mission was to develop non-lethal weapons that might help make modern war a bit more tidy. As all the death and carnage is really just a secondary effect to coercing an enemy people into doing what you want them to do, this seemed a noble goal, to be sure. As always, it seems the devil is in the details …
Specifics
The report was actually titled, “Harassing, Annoying and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals.” The theory was that, if this mystical stuff were to be sprayed over enemy soldiers in the field, they might become so overcome with lust for one another that they would lose interest in their military mission. Hmmm …
The specific stipulation was, “Chemicals that effect (sic) human behavior so that discipline and morale in enemy units is adversely effected (sic). One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”
“Gay Spray” (my term) was but a small portion of the overall initiative. These fun-loving guys also investigated chemicals that might attract annoying or dangerous creatures to enemy positions, others that might paint enemy troops in indelible garish colors, and aerosols that smelled so bad that they could be applied to enemy equipment and thusly render the treated gear unusable. They also researched spray-on chemicals that might induce fearsome bad breath, intolerable body odor and farting. Wright Laboratory sounds quite a bit like a Saturday Night Live skit.
A final example concerned a chemical treatment that might make enemy troops exceptionally susceptible to sunlight. I always thought you had to be bitten to become a vampire. Apparently, all you really need is a proper dose of special Air Force spray.
Ruminations
I was an Army officer for eight years. I like to think we did very serious things fairly well. It is only via the most remarkable force of will that I am currently resisting the urge to heap invective upon my Wing Nut brethren for having dumped $7.5 million trying to develop an aerosol that might transform otherwise-straight men into lust-crazed homosexuals. I can only hope they properly secured that stuff when they got done playing with it. You sure wouldn’t want that getting into the local water supply.
If my Air Force buddies could tolerate a little constructive criticism, you might want to stick with your F35 Lightnings and B21 Raiders. Leave stuff like “Gay Spray” to the standup comedians. Otherwise, your fellow warriors might come to view you as more than just a wee bit silly.
