anthraxination
Anthraxination - Sick today, with the same cold that my wife and daughter have had for two weeks. I’d rather have a natural sickness than a man-made one anyway. Of the biological threats that the U.S. is most wary of, Anthrax tops the list. Anthrax is 100,000 times more deadly than the deadliest chemical weapon. The USSR (when it was still the USSR) developed a weaponized version of Anthrax that is remarkably infectious and hardy. Before the Central Asian republics broke off to form their own countries, Russia attempted to destroy and bury a bunch of tanks of Anthrax on a small island in the Aral Sea. The problem is, the Anthrax is still alive in the soil, and the Aral Sea has mostly dried up, making it easy for any motivated terrorist to hike out and scoop some up. The former Vozrozhdeniye Island, now an Uzbek peninsula, was home to many other chemical and biological weapons, and is deserted now, carrying plague on the desert winds to the surrounding areas.
It’s fitting that this desolate corner of the world is also home to those who are weaponizing infectious words to spread memes of hate and destruction. In the Wu-Tang song Triumph, rapper Method Man uses a simile, “As the world turns, I spread like germs; Bless the globe with the pestilence, the hard-headed never learn.” This is certainly a sentiment shared by Bin Ladin, and more so his incarnation of Hitler’s Dietrich Eckhart, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Most here in the west are immune to the toxic memes, but what to do about Anthrax? A friend of mine worked for the only facility in the U.S. with FDA approval to manufacture Anthrax Vaccine. After he left, the company went through a good deal of turbulence and was eventually privatized (they were originally run by the government). This testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives shows that the government has been aware of a deficiency in our ability to produce Anthrax vaccine for some time. In fact, just two month ago the Department of Defense announced yet another slowdown in Anthrax vaccine production with no estimate of when more would be available. We dropped the ball by letting free media (the antidote to toxic memes) die out in Central Asia; apparently our government has done a crap job of keeping around the antidote for biological agents as well. This is what happens when we skimp on national defense spending.
In an effort to defend against computer worms, ISPs are finally starting to see the wisdom in quarantining infected machines.