Left, Right, and Centered

In Case You Didn’t Have Enough On Your Mind November 30, 2011

Sometimes I wonder how the world manages to make it from each sunrise to the following sunset without bursting into flames or crumbling into dust.  It’s not enough that roughly half the planet’s population thinks the other half would be better off dead, with Americans high on the list of potentially endangered species, or that the European economy is on the brink of collapse to the point where they make our own sputtering finances look healthy by comparison.  It’s not sufficient that a huge number of the world’s children don’t have enough food or clean water, or that scores die in the whole of Africa every day from diseases we haven’t thought about in North America for a century.  It’s not worrisome enough that countries like India and Pakistan stare angrily at one another across the Kashmir border on a daily basis with something like four or five hundred nuclear bombs ready to settle an argument that dates back to tribes fighting over camels and mountaing goats or that North Korea has a couple nukes of their own and a president who could easily stand in for the deranged villain in any James Bond film.  We don’t have enough worries with global warming, AIDS, and the very real prospect of oil running out.  Nah, none of that is sufficient.

We’ve got to have guys who come up with super-viruses that have a greater than 50% mortality and then use some nifty genetic engineering to make them more easily transmitted from one mammal to another.  That’s right…a couple of scientists in the Netherlands have modified H5N1 Bird Flu in such a way that it’s more contagious, and now are about to publish their results…because apparently it’s been way too long since we had a decent Black Plague.

Sort of puts a whole new perspective on your broken furnace or your son’s D+ in algebra…as concerns go.  But hey…it’s probably nothing to worry about.

BW