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The Hogs of Entropy 0219
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>> "BioWar: Not Just a Novel Idea" <<
by -> Tom Adam
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When you hear ebola, what do you think of? Some African disease,
right? Just some virus thing that kills people in Africa. Then you
contentedly sit down with your morning paper to drink coffee. Later you go
to LAX airport to pick up a friend from Gary, Indiana. You sit in the
terminal waiting for your flight, when some polite looking Arab comes
walking past you, and asks you the time. "Eleven-thirty," you would reply,
if that was what the time was. He'd smile friendly and walk off. Your
friend shows up, you go out for lunch, bring him home to the wife and kids.
Three days later you come down with the flu. Five days later you vomit
blood. Seven days later you're in the hospital. Nine days later the doctor
comes in, turns up the morphine drip, and tells you you have the ebola
virus. Eleven days later they put your body in a heavy rubber bag and
cremate you.
All right, this can't happen. Ebola doesn't spread through the air,
aerosol they call it. Other diseases do, few as fatal as ebola, but fatal
enough. How would the virus get here? Well, do you remember that friendly
Arab, or maybe he would be Chinese, or African, or American, you couldn't
tell. That friendly person came from some country where he (or she, we must
be fair to those dying of infectious diseases) got infected, got on a plane,
infected everyone on the plane, then they infected everyone they came near,
and so on. Of course then, two days later the hospitals start filling up,
then twelve days later, people start dying. And it all started out looking
like the flu.
I can see how you would be wondering, "Bio War? What does that have
to do with this article?" Simple. Imagine that friendly person who
infected you. Imagine the person who infected them. Imagine the sadistic
terrorist who infected himself. That sadistic terrorist got on an airplane
straight for the US. That sadistic terrorist (or, as his fellow psychopaths
would think, the brave martyr) willingly did this to himself, in order to
hurt us.
It wouldn't be too hard. You don't have to take a week long physical
before getting on an international flight. So some country who has access
to infectious diseases, or a really clever engineering team and bio-chemical
weapons, could get anything into this country.
It's a really great thing that there aren't any countries in this
world that would do such a bad thing. Certainly not Iraq. No sort of
terrorist, oh, sorry, freedom fighting regime could ever do that.
But let's imagine, in some bizarre world, someone was crazy enough to
do that. What would we do? Would we all rush to the hospital to get the
vaccine? Sorry, pal, no vaccines for viruses. Would we contain the few
people who had the disease? If the person who chose to infect everyone else
(who shall hereafter be referred to as the infector) was smart, there would
be too many infected people (who shall henceforth be call infectees) to
contain all of them from any other people.
A really smart infector would only have to walk through an airport to
get his job done. An international airport to get his message across really
well. He would then proceed to write a message saying what he did, and kill
himself outside of a TV station or newspaper, where it would get out right
away. And then what would we do? For the first few hours, while everyone
got the news, nothing. Then we would panic. Mass riots, fire-bombings,
fanatical religious conversions, that would be the next few days. After
that we would all settle down to wait for the end.
But we wouldn't all die. Our paranoid reclusiveness probably saved
our lives, and now only a few percent of our population, say
twenty-thousand, died. Great, most of us lived. But that one "heroic
martyr" would be down in hell laughing for a few days saying everyone got
his message.
Then the president gets smart and blows up the country the terrorist
came from.
Too bad this is only in fantasy land, huh? It would be nice to have
a president that smart.
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* (c) HoE publications. HoE #219 -- written by Tom Adam -- 3/19/98 *
