So as most of the non-yurt dwelling among you probably already know, about a week ago a James Bond villain took out the entire water supply for a significant chunk of West Virginia.
A truly startling amount of the chemical MCHM* was basically dumped into a river due to a complex process known as 'nobody giving much of a crap about what was going on with the big leaking container over there'
*I could cut and paste the full name of the chemical from my cursory research on the subject, but it wouldn't leave any of us any the wiser. Suffice it to say it's apparently blue, nobody knows what it does, what it's for, whether it causes mutations (so there's still hope for those budding West Virginian Superheros out there) or basically anything about it. It's one of around 6,000 chemicals that were grandfathered in under the chemical regulations act, when Congress boldly looked at a bunch of different sinisterly steaming plastic buckets, shrugged, and said 'Ah, I'm sure they're probably fine.'
Now, a spill like this is obviously more or less what any reasonable person expects is going to happen under a government that spends most of its time doggedly doing its best to remove anything that might actually prevent this sort of thing from inevitably happening. The really interesting thing about it turns out to be the identity of the Bond villain who did the spilling.
It turns out that the chemicals in question (and lots of fun others that we know absolutely nothing about) are stored along the river by a company called Freedom Industries.
Freedom Industries, as you can clearly tell by the name, is a company that exists to store mysterious chemicals in large containers along municipal water supplies.
The President of Freedom Industries, the deeply-ironically named 'Mr. Southern', aside from having to face a stern talking to later on some time will undoubtedly go down in history as 'most unfortunate usage of a hand prop during a press conference ever.' Seriously - If your company just poisoned the water supply for about a quarter of a state, maybe you should not spend the entire press conference chugging down bottled water. It kind of makes you look openly contemptuous of the 300,000 folks you just tried to poison. At the very least it makes you appear to be an enormous douche.
What I really don't get though - how on Earth did anybody see that there was a company named 'Freedom Industries' and not immediately have a million red flags go off? It's not quite as blatant as 'Legitimate Olive Oil Importation Business, We Swear', but it's close. I honestly think that at this point you could start up a company that did nothing but force feed razor blades to bunny rabbits for absolutely no reason whatsoever and everyone would be just fine with it as long as you named yourself Jesus Loves America Patriotism Go Flag Go, Inc.
'Gosh.... I shore do like bunny rabbits... But I sure as shootin' cain't side against Jesus! That company must be A-OK! Go 'Murica!'
It's like people want Goldfinger to nuke their gold supply, I swear to God.
The 42nd Vizsla - Because there were already 41 Vizslas registered here.
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