91 lines
5.0 KiB
Plaintext
91 lines
5.0 KiB
Plaintext
|
|
$$$$$$$$$$$
|
|
$$$$$$$$$$$ hogz of entropy #219
|
|
$$$$$P $$$$ $$$$ moo, oink, up your butt.
|
|
$$$$P $$$$ x$$$$
|
|
$$$P $$$$ xP$$$$ d$$$$$$$$$$$.
|
|
$$$. $$$$xP $$$$ $$$$$$' >$$$$
|
|
$$$$$$$$$. $$$$P $$$$ 4$$$$$. .$$$$'
|
|
$$$$'`4$$$b. $$$$ $$$$ 4$$$$$$$$$P'
|
|
$$$$b 4$$$$b. $$$$$$$$$$$ 4$$$< %%
|
|
$$$$$b 4$$$$$x $$$$$$$$$$$ 4$$$$$$$$$ %%
|
|
|
|
>> "BioWar: Not Just a Novel Idea" <<
|
|
by -> Tom Adam
|
|
|
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
* (c) HoE publications. HoE #219 -- written by Tom Adam -- 3/19/98 *
|