This massive tax increase under the guise of “global warming” has far-reaching implications for our future. If you are reading this on Friday, June 26 please call and urge your congressperson to vote NO. The House is planning to vote in just a few hours so call right away if you can. There is, at least, a fair chance this bill can be defeated – I for one believe it should be.
Jun 26 2009
Quick, what’s scarier? Missing nukes, or missing bugs?
With three days left in spring cleaning season, a US army lab that works on the world’s deadliest pathogens has turned up uncatalogued vials of Ebola, anthrax, plague and other pathogens – 9220 of them to be precise.
The laboratory is the same one where anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins worked before he committed suicide last year. The US government suspects Ivins was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, and studies showed that the anthrax used in the attack was “directly related” to the batch stored at the lab.
The discovery of the uncatalogued vials raises questions about whether anyone would notice if some of the lab’s pathogens went missing.
“A small number would be a concern; 9200 … at an institution that has been the focus of intense scrutiny on this issue, that’s deeply worrisome. Unacceptable,” Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, told the Washington Post.
If you see some guys in white lab coats selling vials of “special fragrance” at the swap meet, I suggest you find someplace else to shop. I’m not sure if this is scarier than missing Russian suitcase nukes, but it’s at least competitive on the scare-o-meter. Does anybody think that the anthrax-spreading misanthrope is the only geek with a big brain and a tiny moral center?
There are days when I wonder if the human race is just too stupid to live. Then I’ll buck up a bit, and start feeling less pessimistic. But not long after that, I’ll hear a bunch of people, who should know better, waxing rhapsodic about the wonderfulness of government mananged healthcare for the future. It reminds me, as if I needed reminding, that the innumerate and the illiterate have no defenses against technocrats, their natural predators.
If the missing Russian nukes, the Iranian nukes, the North Korean nukes, or the pathogenic terrorists don’t get us, then it’ll be the nanotech that does it, when the first self-replicating machine (originally designed to “eat waste at toxic waste-dumps”) turns the entire Earth into a gigantic orbiting pile of staples — covered, incidentally, with Ebola spores.
I’m sure they’ll be very useful to someone (the staples, that is). I expect that the Intragalactic Council on Emerging Technology (ICE-T) will have a LOT of reports to fill out.
