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Smallpox From The Past
An anonymous reader submits "Earlier this year, librarian Susanne Caro was looking through an 1888 book on United States Civil War medicine and discovered a small envelope labeled 'scabs from vaccination of W.B. Yarrington's children' and signed by Dr. W.D. Kelly, the author of the book. After a bit of research, she realized they might be smallpox scabs used in early live vaccination methods and contacted various officials including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC was excited by the find, because it gives them an untreated specimen from over a century ago, and a chance to look at the disease's evolution. Although the FBI had concerns that the smallpox may have been planted in the book, most of the researchers believe the scabs are too old to be dangerous, and they fear they may not even be able to yield live smallpox."
Ok, the FBI thinks someone planted smallpox, in an envelope LABELLED with biohazard information, in a 19th century book, in Santa Fe. What the hell is wrong with them? I mean, that's just moronic.
Anthrax in envelopes you didn't expect is one thing, although not easily avoided you can minimize the risks in such situations; but picture terrorists selling things with anthrax in them on sites such as ebay and amazon.com.
They might not be able to target the people they want, but they could reach 1'000's of people and completely ruin the business of selling used things online.
Suddenly anyone could be a target of a terroristattack...
perl -e'print$_{$_} for sort%_=`lynx -dump svanstrom.com/t`'
There's also a slim chance, researchers say, that the scabs could yield live smallpox virus -- believed to reside in only two laboratories in the world
Only the naive believe that live smallpox exists in only two labs in the world. A more accurate statement in the article would have been "only legally allowed in two labs in the world."
There is strong reason to believe that North Korea has the virus. France is also believed to have it. Iraq may have had it up until recently, as it was endemic in the region in the late sixties, and just a few scabs in a refrigerator would have been enough. It used to be common practice for scientists and doctors to keep a bit of smallpox in the fridge when they gathered it from patients. Hence there could be samples, possibly not even labelled or known to the owners, in a number of places in the world.
One reason that the plan to destroy all stocks at the CDC and the official Russian lab was the realization that rogue countries probably had the virus, and hence destroying it would damage future defense attempts.
Furthermore, the USSR and later Russia maintained stockpiles of 20 tons of weaponized smallpox in the eighties (authorized by Gorbachev) and probably to the present, and loaded it into missile warheads. Furthermore, a number of their scientists have since emigrated to other countries. In 1994 a number visited North Korea for unknown reasons. One former Soviet BW officieal entered into a deal with Iraq to sell 5000 liter fermenters.
And then we have accidental discoveries like these scabs. Smallpox can survive in scabs for a long time, although >100 years is stretching it.
The only good weather is bad weather.
welcome are new FBI overlords.
Seriously, this was probably a routine chit chat thay have when enybody discovers something like this.
I'm sure they new full well it wasn't a real issue. otherwise it would have been VANS of FBI agents.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Also, a biologic agent takes hours if not days to act, allowing for retaliatory strikes, so a biologic ICBM is clearly a kind of Doomsday Machine -- what is to say that the smallbox doesn't spread back to Russia. And you have such a Doomsday Machines, in the words of Peter Sellers, why don't you advertise it to the whole world? What good is a Doomsday Machine that you keep secret?
Of all the changes I proposed, dropping the Electoral College is the most "radical", as in the dictionary definition "going to the root". The difference between a republic and a democracy, at least according to Plato, is the difference betwen the people setting the laws directly, and the people setting representatives who set the laws for them. Analogous to a value, and a pointer to a value. Or a libertarian society out of Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, with exclusively citizen's arrests, and immediate trials by a jury of witnesses and bystanders, versus selected representatives to do the work of government on behalf of the people, who periodically select those representatives.
The Electoral College, though, is more like a "handle", a pointer to a pointer (to a value). The people elect Electors, who elect representatives, who elect laws. This design pattern is great for large populations of interchangeable sets of values, within which one repeatedly selects a specific value. Fast, repeated switching, along with clear semantics for the two layers of indirection are requirements for which handles are appropriate. They're also appropriate for very large populations of values, too large in number to address by the limited precision of a simple pointer. Memory spaces larger in magnitude than the bitwidth of the pointer are addressed this way, eg. >4GB RAM in a 32bit pointer to a character. Both of these applications of handles are workarounds for limitations of the addressing scheme. They work well, but when the limitations don't exist, they're unnecessary overkill, confusing, and prone to error, especially when writing new software that doesn't reflect the double-indirection of the handle.
For the first hundred years or so of the American republic, a handle solved the problem of managing the communication of the large (1-10M+) population. Any timely consensus was "fast" in an age of horses and sail, across half a continent. And breaking the population into manageable tiers of components was absolutely necessary in managing reliable communication using newspapers among the largely illiterate, public speeches among the largely rural, and bean counting boxes among a largely post-feudal population. It was a design decision to overcome problems of implementing a republic on a scale orders of magnitude larger than any experienced by Plato, or anywhere else. It was wise to start the implementation with overkill and scale back, rather than fail early due to an unmanageable complexity. But now it just gets in the way.
Who can defend any of the elections where the electoral vote misrepresented the popular vote, especially the gamed 2000 presidential election? The Electoral College was a flawed design from the beginning, vulnerable to system gaming. For example, a current book called _Negro President_ analyzes Jefferson's 1801 ascension to the the presidency owing to his electoral victories in the South. His electoral votes were swelled by the 3/5 elector per person value of slaves (who couldn't vote); if only voters were counted, Jefferson would have merely been a brilliant writer and revolutionary. Whether that would have been as good for the country, especially in light of the Louisiana Purchase, is another debate. But the will of the people was subverted by Electoral College manipulation, and continues to be. We don't need it, and its dead weight is helping drag down our country - drop it now.
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make install -not war