As we winterpatriot readers know, the creation of disasters is nothing new. But the methods are ever-evolving. Along those lines, here are a couple stories that caught my attention this week.
DUTCH RESEARCHER CREATES A SUPER-DEADLY INFLUENZA VIRUS WITH THE POTENTIAL TO KILL HALF OF EARTH'S POPULATION
first in the news in Nov 2011 (did we already hit this one here?)
Richard H. Ebright, a chemistry professor and bioweapons expert at Rutgers University who has long opposed such research said, “This research should not have been done.”
He warned that germs that could be used as bioweapons had already been unintentionally released hundreds of times from labs in the United States and predicted that the same thing would happen with the new virus.
He said. “It will inevitably escape, and within a decade.”
http://tommytoy.typepad.com/tommy-toy-pbt-consultin/2012/01/dutch-resear...
Texas college hacks drone in front of DHS
“Spoofing a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane,” Humphreys tells Fox. The real danger here, however, is that the government is currently considering plans that will allow local law enforcement agencies and other organizations from coast-to-coast to control drones of their own in America’s airspace.
“In five or ten years you have 30,000 drones in the airspace,” he tells Fox News. “Each one of these could be a potential missile used against us.”
Comments
sorry to be so slow
but you don't suppose any obvious disasters have been created quite recently, do you?
hmmm
Hi winter
Hi Winter,
Good to see you online. . I am afraid I have been right out of the news cycle of late. I am taking a break for my sanity's sake.
What recent disasters did you have in mind?
hi McJ, a few days late
Hope all's well!
I think Winter must have been referring to the theatre shooting in Colorado.
Subsequently followed (after his post) by the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin.
A note from Mr. Punctual
More apologies. I am still badly hampered, and everything takes longer than expected. I was indeed thinking about the Aurora shooting, but then as NJT says, another shooting happened, and I got thinking about other shootings, and other disasters, too ...
And it occurred to me that Iraq is a disaster, Afghanistan is a disaster, Vietnam was a disaster and so were Guatemala, Iran, Haiti, Chile ... US foreign policy has been one disaster after another, as far back as you care to look ...
9/11 was a disaster, and so were Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, Fukushima, Deepwater Horizon -- the latter all commercial disasters and all clearly man-made...
And Prohibition was a disaster and slavery was a disaster, leading to the disastrous Civil War of which Gettysburg was a total disaster ... and who could love Sherman's march to the sea? Or the modern equivalent, the deliberate flooding of New Orleans after it was grazed by Hurricane Katrina.
I've left a lot off my list, things that have happened before and since, but it's been one disaster after another, all either deliberately inflicted or else set up by the combination of grandiose profit-seeking and gross negligence (which amounts to "deliberately inflicted" in the long run) and the more I thought about it, the more it became a case of trying to find an exception...
which I still have not managed to do ...
not that this excuses my lack of punctuality, but HEY! I'm still thinkin'!
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