I think it’s pretty obvious that this was some kind of stock-manipulation scheme. Literally fake news! It’s always scary that a single piece of false information can have such a big impact.
Like, you know, launching a tariff war on agricultural products, maybe?
A Houston radio station used to run a Saturday program aimed at farmers and ranchers, in which participants would reminisce about old-time happenings, interspersed with cowboy songs about life on the range. At least one time they ran a piece on cattle screwworm infestations, which I now find were eradicated back in the 1960s in Texas and the lower U.S. south.
Hopefully we won’t have to release a whole mess of irradiated screwworm flies again.
Band name!
I was doing archeology work in NM in 1978 when a small plane dropped a box from a couple of hundred feet. It was labeled USDA(or something similar, don’t really recall) and it contained irradiated screw worm flies. I guess that is how they were distributed.
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Coincidentally, I read this (long, detailed) article around a week ago.