Syria loading Sarin into bombs for deployment

[Mr Bean]

Random question - what makes your (poster's) attitudes change when it's death by chemicals, as opposed to death by a bullet to the head, a tank-shell to the neighbourhood, or other similar slaughter-methods?

Depending on the chemical your talking a few hours of lethality to several weeks or months. If someone is shooting people the killing stops the instant the bullets do. There are chemical warfare agents called area denial agents which linger for weeks and can be found in covered areas months later. Sarin as far as chemical weapons go is just lethal and degrades in a day but run-off can persist in water supplies for over a week.

Also chemical weapons are specifically targeted at civilian since any military even a third rate military can protect their armed forces against a gas attack.

[Aaron MkII]

It can be quite persistent depending on the formula, up to several months. If you drop that on a city or an area that is heavily trafficked then your looking at a high cost in lives and decontamination. Which answers Sqeakers question.

[LaCroix]

Random question - what makes your (poster's) attitudes change when it's death by chemicals, as opposed to death by a bullet to the head, a tank-shell to the neighbourhood, or other similar slaughter-methods?

Bullets, tank-shells or fighter dropped bombs/rockets/missiles are at least aimed at something, and you have a chance to not be there.

Gas weapons blanket areas, and you can't seek cover. It's the epitome of "Kill them all, let god sort them out", and almost specific to kill civilians, since most militias at least have some access to gas masks.

And I guess we would react the same if they were preparing for conventional carpet bombing of cities.

[Simon_Jester]

If the Syrian Air Force is using nerve gas, ordinary gas masks won't do any good; the stuff's deadly on skin contact, let alone inhalation.

And yes, the real difference between gas and gunfire- you can't make gas go away by waving a white flag at it, it doesn't stop killing people the minute the shooting stops, it's more effective against unprotected civilians than against protected combatants, it's especially good at murdering cities while leaving the buildings physically intact for post-genocide operations. All those are important.

Even so, the "C" in "NBC" is really not on the same plane as the others- nuclear and biological weapons are even more indiscriminate and brutal, bioweapons the worst of all for that.

[Formless]

Random question - what makes your (poster's) attitudes change when it's death by chemicals, as opposed to death by a bullet to the head, a tank-shell to the neighbourhood, or other similar slaughter-methods?

Sarin and other chemicals tend to pollute the environment for years after the conflict is over.

Of course, so do mines and cluster bombs.

A purely legalistic distinction would be that Chemical weapons were banned by the Hague and that using them is a war crime. Shooting people is not.

Even so, the "C" in "NBC" is really not on the same plane as the others- nuclear and biological weapons are even more indiscriminate and brutal, bioweapons the worst of all for that.

Only in Tom Clancy novels.

In reality, nothing is as brutal or indiscriminate as a nuclear bomb, and many bioweapons are essentially vat grown chemical weapons (eg. botulism toxin, ricin, etc.). Others are designed to incapacitate, but not kill (because sick soldiers don't fight and take up room in the hospital). Getting them to spread person to person zombie-plague style is actually very hard, despite media portrayals, and its as easy to stop as to create a proper quarantine. If I had the choice between having anthrax spores dropped on my house and having sarin dropped on it, I would take the Anthrax any day. With anthrax I at least don't have to worry about skin exposure.

Point is, there are a shitload of potential bioweapons out there, most of which are no more scary than chemical weapons (and many are less scary). Saying that they are as a whole more indiscriminate than goddamn nuclear bombs is just media scaremongering at work.

[Mr Bean]

Even so, the "C" in "NBC" is really not on the same plane as the others- nuclear and biological weapons are even more indiscriminate and brutal, bioweapons the worst of all for that.

Only in Tom Clancy novels.

In reality, nothing is as brutal or indiscriminate as a nuclear bomb, and many bioweapons are essentially vat grown chemical weapons (eg. botulism toxin, ricin, etc.). Others are designed to incapacitate, but not kill (because sick soldiers don't fight and take up room in the hospital). Getting them to spread person to person zombie-plague style is actually very hard, despite media portrayals, and its as easy to stop as to create a proper quarantine. If I had the choice between having anthrax spores dropped on my house and having sarin dropped on it, I would take the Anthrax any day. With anthrax I at least don't have to worry about skin exposure.

Point is, there are a shitload of potential bioweapons out there, most of which are no more scary than chemical weapons (and many are less scary). Saying that they are as a whole more indiscriminate than goddamn nuclear bombs is just media scaremongering at work.

Formless you are under-informed about the state of bio-weapons. One needs to look back no further than 1918 to find a nature created Bio-weapon that killed between three to six percent of total global population (The Spanish Flu) to find something that nature crafted and kicked our ass.

Just a year ago There was a story about super bird flu a virus that's 60% lethal but has a hard time spreading in humans. So the scientists stepped in and made a version that spread much easier and faster. It exists and it did not take two trillion in investments to make. It was created on lab that cost just shy of two hundred million to build by a team of less than thirty. And since that work was published it's very easy to duplicate (As part of publishing is so people can duplicate your work)

Try reading some of the CDC's websites manuals about dealing with bio terrorism (available on their website) and you'll find reports written by people terrified of what could happen. These are documents not written by "the media" but people with decades of experience who are terrified if a third party group got their hands on a bioweapon with intent to use it and the time to build a competent delivery system. Some of the aerosol designs unfortunately you can find online. Because those autospraying air freshers are perfect for placing an aerosol agent in, you just need a compressor and a few shop parts to empty a cylinder and refill it with your poison of choice.

*Edit
And by the way, along with duplicating the Rotterdam results, there are samples of Spanish Flu of 1918 still on ice in places like the CDC and the various biological labs around the world. While a break in at the CDC is unlikely it's much more likely in some of the other first world countries, for example in 2004 the Lazzaro Spallanzani Insitute in Italy received a failing grade as during an inspection an unauthorized person was able to access the disease vault which had samples of everything from Ebola to the Plague inside.

[Formless]

My god, what kind of bullshit am I reading? Oh, that's right, a Mr Bean post! That kind of bullshit!

What isn't said in Bean's little glimps of inanity is that none of that has to do with weaponized diseases. That makes a massive fucking difference, because not every disease out there is appropriate for germ warfare or bioterrorism. Think about it: there is no known cure for chronic wasting disease or any other prion disease. But because you have to actually ingest prions to be infected by them, their bioweapon potential is limited.

The 1918 spanish flu has been extinct for almost a century. No researcher who currently has access to the remaining samples is going to just hand them to a terrorist or rouge state, and there are controls in place if any of them were nuts enough to try. What makes for a good plot on Numbers is something real institutions would like to prevent. Likewise, Bird Flu is known to be nowhere near as contagious as the Spanish flu, as he admits in his own post. Can you change that? Sure, but again you would need access to the samples. Furthermore, Bird Flu's failure to cause a catastrophic pandemic goes to show how effective modern institutions like the CDC are at establishing quarantine before a pandemic can arise. And they got this good precisely because diseases are a natural phenomenon. SARS, swine flu... in fact, basically ever Flu or similar disease that people were worried would become the next Spanish flu from the last decade was squashed similarly quickly before they could do real damage. Are you perhaps starting to see the media narrative at work? "Big new disease in China! Will go Pandemic and kill us all! Oh, wait, its been handled, we're just going to let it fall into obscurity till the next outbreak of something scary sounding".

Very few diseases are nearly as contagious as the flu, so most diseases that have ever been weaponized aren't very contagious. Most of them have been bacterial, and at least one fungus I am aware of. Why? Because those are the diseases that can be aerosolized easily, and you can grow them in a vat. Viral agents are more complicated to use, despite how often they are used as the face of germ warfare.

The only viral agents the US ever experimented with were all spread by insects like mosquitos (see Venezuelan equine encephalitis). Sure, the Soviets supposedly experimented with smallpox; but they never revealed enough about their program for anyone to really know what the capabilities of that were. For all we know they may well have made it less contagious as a safety measure (consider that Russia had at least one outbreak of anthrax linked to their biowarfare program). This is because the rout of infection for most viral agents are everything but the airways. Influenza is exceptional in that regard, and the common cold just doesn't make people sick enough to be worthwhile.

So entomological weapons. Their problem? Insects don't like cold temperatures, for one thing, and for another they have short lifespans. So they don't shelve well.

And of course, aerosolizing a disease doesn't mean you have a delivery system. Its half of a delivery system. The other half is the aircraft that carries the aerosol-bomb over the target area. Only now the question arises, what about this is any more or less terrifying than a plane carrying nerve agents? ...which was the point I was trying to make, and had ignored.

That is why you fail, Bean Brain.

[Terralthra]

Aircraft? Bomb? You're thinking war, not terrorism. If you have a reasonably aerosol disease, you sneak it into a subway car in New York City, or a BART car in SF, in a slightly pressurized container, leave it under the seat at 6:15 AM or so on a Tuesday, on a car on the Financial District route with a needle set to puncture it 30 minutes later. The NYC or SF metroplex is effectively fucked. Like, seriously. You just infected hundreds of thousands of people, most of them working in skyscrapers with ventilation systems which will spread the infection further during the latent period. SF even has the benefit of the same car servicing morning commute and the international airport, for a brilliant double-shot of fucked.

[Formless]

Yes, however the context of the conversation originally was in fact conventional warfare (or rather, conventional in the same sense as nuclear bombs are conventional warfare ).

Besides, out of that context chemical weapons are still no less scary. Just ask the Japanese.

Edit: And remember, terrorists don't tend to use the most sophisticated of delivery systems. The Tokyo attackers just had the sarin in plastic bags which they had to poke holes into manually. There is the Rajneeshee attack in Oregon where the diseases were food born... and all they did was carry them in plastic bags which they tried to spread into food bars of various restaurants around town. And of course there are the well known anthrax letters from around 2001 (some of which IIRC were actually just covered in flour to scare people). Aerosols could be used cheaply, but that's not the pattern most known attacks have followed.

[Terralthra]

That's kind of Mr. Bean's point (and he did say "bioterrorism"): most who have tried to use bioterrorism have done so in a shoddy and haphazard fashion, with ineffective toxins and poor methods. If someone with a couple biology degrees gets it into their head to terrorize the western world, it's going to get really ugly, really fast.

[Formless]

True, I never said bioweapons are harmless or shouldn't be classified as WMDs. I'm just saying, the same would be true if a few competent chemists got into the terrorism business, assuming they knew how to create/obtain a decent chemical sprayer.

Though I do still think its scaremongering to worry about someone getting their hands on spanish flu samples.

[Simon_Jester]

Spanish flu is more an illustration of the limits of the possible than anything else. It was a mutated flu, it killed tens of millions, and it happened naturally. In light of that, dismissing the idea of someone doing it artificially seems premature.

[Terralthra]

The main reason I can see for calling bioweapons more "indiscriminate" than nuclear weapons is that nukes destroy utterly an area you target, and make inhospitable an area around that target. Bioweapons kill people where you target, and also potentially everywhere else, because of the global transportation network and the latency period of most viruses and bacteria.

[Formless]

Spanish flu is more an illustration of the limits of the possible than anything else. It was a mutated flu, it killed tens of millions, and it happened naturally. In light of that, dismissing the idea of someone doing it artificially seems premature.

Why would they do it artificially? What makes people think that it is desirable in a bioweapon for it to be so infective and indiscriminate that the people releasing it cannot keep it from infecting friendly populations? Certainly no terrorist would use it, as the goals of terrorism are to promote an ideology or further a political cause. A pandemic would piss off everyone and set them against your cause. Likewise, unless they had a Vaccine already prepared, no nation would use such a weapon because it would be Mutually Assured Destruction. However, unlike Nuclear MAD its not because the other nation retaliates-- it is entirely because your dumb ass set off a pandemic weapon.

Point goes right back to what I said earlier. What nature is capable of and what a human weaponeer are looking for in a bug are in opposition. That's reason #1 that I dismiss the Spanish Flu situation when talking about bioweapons. Reason #2 is of course that Spanish Flu is under lock and key, so it specifically isn't much to worry about any time soon barring neo-connightmare scenarios.

#3 is that even if the 1918 flu situation happened today, I do not think it would be nearly as harmful today as it was in 1918. It wasn't just the disease itself that made it bad, but the circumstances. It happened right after a World War, there was a global transit system in place (less efficient than today, but a global transit system nonetheless), and I doubt that the public health organizations of 1918 were as efficient at their jobs as modern agencies like the CDC. I bet you that the first world, at least, is beyond the point where it can be destroyed by pandemic. Third world is another story.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Why would they do it artificially? What makes people think that it is desirable in a bioweapon for it to be so infective and indiscriminate that the people releasing it cannot keep it from infecting friendly populations? Certainly no terrorist would use it, as the goals of terrorism are to promote an ideology or further a political cause.

Or because they think their god wants them to. If anything, we've been saved by the fact that religious fanatics are almost never found in the biological sciences; they've got plenty of engineers (thus all those terrorist bombs), but few if any biologists.

And some terrorist whose goal is simply revenge against a hated population might release such a disease as well, without concern for what happens to friendly populations (assuming they have any).

[Formless]

Why would they do it artificially? What makes people think that it is desirable in a bioweapon for it to be so infective and indiscriminate that the people releasing it cannot keep it from infecting friendly populations? Certainly no terrorist would use it, as the goals of terrorism are to promote an ideology or further a political cause.

Or because they think their god wants them to. If anything, we've been saved by the fact that religious fanatics are almost never found in the biological sciences; they've got plenty of engineers (thus all those terrorist bombs), but few if any biologists.

Man, I really hate this one. Even suicide cults keep the killing within the cult. Why the hell do people think this is a valid concern? Are people just too immature to think about religious people and their motivations rationally?

I mean, what are you going to do? Deny religious people from learning microbiology? Yeah, that'll convert 'em from their fanaticism.

Fuck you. Moron.

[Simon_Jester]

Spanish flu is more an illustration of the limits of the possible than anything else. It was a mutated flu, it killed tens of millions, and it happened naturally. In light of that, dismissing the idea of someone doing it artificially seems premature.

Why would they do it artificially? What makes people think that it is desirable in a bioweapon for it to be so infective and indiscriminate that the people releasing it cannot keep it from infecting friendly populations? Certainly no terrorist would use it, as the goals of terrorism are to promote an ideology or further a political cause. A pandemic would piss off everyone and set them against your cause. Likewise, unless they had a Vaccine already prepared, no nation would use such a weapon because it would be Mutually Assured Destruction. However, unlike Nuclear MAD its not because the other nation retaliates-- it is entirely because your dumb ass set off a pandemic weapon.

Flu vaccines are quite well known- I would not be at all surprised to see someone develop a killer flu strain and its vaccine in isolation.

Would anyone be nuts enough to use it? I don't know. Would anyone be nuts enough to fire nuclear missiles? That's just as stupid an idea if you don't like piles of bodies. But all national governments take that possibility very seriously. I can't understand why you don't.

[Formless]

Would anyone be nuts enough to use it? I don't know. Would anyone be nuts enough to fire nuclear missiles? That's just as stupid an idea if you don't like piles of bodies. But all national governments take that possibility very seriously. I can't understand why you don't.

Because in the case of nuclear war, there were and are people in the government and military that seriously believed that a nuclear war could be fought and won. They could believe this because the primary cause of casualties on their own side would be a result of retaliation. But if you are making a flu virus to be a weapon, intentionally making it pandemic-capable is suicidal. And, well, unnecessary when you could make a more easily controlled weapon instead.

(as for the making dead bodies thing, we're not talking about our own motivations and beliefs, but the motivations and beliefs of national leaders and terrorists)

[Sea Skimmer]

The only viral agents the US ever experimented with were all spread by insects like mosquitos (see Venezuelan equine encephalitis).

Well the US was also in general more concerned with destroying corps and lives stock and not so much directly killing people on the weaponization front. Most of the weaponizing anti human efforts were aimed at incapacitating agents that would produce only low death rates but very protracted outbreaks. That'd actually be fucking ideal for Assad right now, but I don't even remotely expect that. On the other hand, at least one case of domestic bioterrorism in the US already exists specifically for the purpose of incapacitating people, that cult up in Oregon state in the 1980s that made over 700 people sick with Salmonella to try to win an election by keeping them at home and not voting. Nobody died, but this was also an attack pulled by complete retards.

And of course, aerosolizing a disease doesn't mean you have a delivery system. Its half of a delivery system. The other half is the aircraft that carries the aerosol-bomb over the target area. Only now the question arises, what about this is any more or less terrifying than a plane carrying nerve agents? ...which was the point I was trying to make, and had ignored.

Aircraft... yeah any aircraft at all works and a spray tank is more likely then a bomb, though cluster bombs are great if you want to fly at high altitude and still fairly easy to build. The best US ones were supposed to let a B-52 contaminate an area about 3000x100 miles. A nuclear or chemical payload could not even remotely come close to this. That's the whole thing, with bioweapons one light aircraft could kill tens of thousands of people as noted before, while dozens of fighter bombers armed with nerve and mustard gas hit Halabja and killed about 1/16th the population. Rockets, or spray tanks on ground vehicles, or mines, or just cutting open bags of dry powdered agent upwind of the target also work with minimal effort. Aerosolizing is by far the more difficult half of the delivery system and once it does work it will be at least several orders of more magnitude deadly then nerve gas per mass, even if the germs themselves have a fairly low lethality rate. The worst germs could be five or six orders of magnitude more effective under optimal conditions.

Tests with covert aerosol spray tanks delivered by divers were conducted with harmess bacteria back in the 1950s, on US cities, and basically resulted one man portable sprayer contaminating the entire urban area. The real problem though bioweapons isn't exactly how deadly they are in terms of initial exposure anyway, since actual lethality is going to be much lower then it is on paper, its how damn hard it is to detect the before you already have a huge outbreak. Nerve gas is kind of handy just because it kills people at once, and other people won't keep walking into the contaminated zone because its a carpet of corpses. Persistant nerve gas also tends to be too viscous to spread in the wind. This makes bioweapons much more dangerous even if they have no ability at all to spread person to person like anthrax.

[mr friendly guy]

Why would they do it artificially? What makes people think that it is desirable in a bioweapon for it to be so infective and indiscriminate that the people releasing it cannot keep it from infecting friendly populations? Certainly no terrorist would use it, as the goals of terrorism are to promote an ideology or further a political cause.

Or because they think their god wants them to. If anything, we've been saved by the fact that religious fanatics are almost never found in the biological sciences; they've got plenty of engineers (thus all those terrorist bombs), but few if any biologists.

Man, I really hate this one. Even suicide cults keep the killing within the cult. Why the hell do people think this is a valid concern? Are people just too immature to think about religious people and their motivations rationally?

I mean, what are you going to do? Deny religious people from learning microbiology? Yeah, that'll convert 'em from their fanaticism.

Fuck you. Moron.

Unless I am misreading him, he implied religious fundies CHOOSE NOT TO learn biological science, rather than people have been actively denying them the opportunity to learn biological science.

[Formless]

Well, that's helpful information, Sea Skimmer. Most of the sources I've read don't have data on how far a bioweapon could actually be spread by an aircraft or other delivery system compared to a chemical weapon.

Unless I am misreading him, he implied religious fundies CHOOSE NOT TO learn biological science, rather than people have been actively denying them the opportunity to learn biological science.

No no, you misunderstand. My beef is the idea religious fanatics (and lets face it, every time this line is used they're talking about muslims) are omnicidal, and the implication is that teaching them things they could be dangerous is a bad thing. Of course, education is what they need to break out of their beliefs, so its a sentiment that helps no one. I don't know any religion whose followers are that insane * , but of course its something the more cynical of atheists can say and reasonably hope no one notices they are spouting hateful bullshit. So I'm calling it out as hateful bullshit.

* again, barring suicide cults as the psychology there is social control taken to a self destructive place. They don't normally hurt people outside the cult.

[Sea Skimmer]

Well, that's helpful information, Sea Skimmer. Most of the sources I've read don't have data on how far a bioweapon could actually be spread by an aircraft or other delivery system compared to a chemical weapon.

Isn't that much in the public domain, and if we believe the US government most offensive research was physically destroyed, but they did release some stuff on one specific B-52 payload which was basically not exactly a normal cluster bomb, but like a giant drum that slowly dropped cluster bomblets which air burst one by one. They tested these by setting up detector stations across much of the entire US at one point, and found bioagents blowing for days at infectious concentrations. I believe that specific dispersal area was for an dust like anti crop agent. The idea was if we kill all the rice and pigs in China, then even if those diseases hit the US it won't destroy our food supply to the same degree it would murder the Chinese. Thus we have a solution to the commie Chinese being so rural, and thus hard to kill with 25 megaton gravity bombs.

These optimal dispersal areas are iffy though, since diseases never seem to spread well at merely the minimal lab thresholds to be infectious. This was certainly a problem for the Japanese WW2 effort, though the Japanese effort was also absurdly crude, and being dropped onto a population that was already massively ravaged by so many disease deaths that outbreaks didn't always even get noticed.

[Mr Bean]

My god, what kind of bullshit am I reading? Oh, that's right, a Mr Bean post! That kind of bullshit!

You really need a new tune Formless. You play this game every few weeks with someone, you make broad sweeping claims. You have said claims refuted and corrected and you get offended when this is pointed out. Because Formless knows all and sees all and the possibly of being in error about any statement is impossible.

What isn't said in Bean's little glimps of inanity is that none of that has to do with weaponized diseases. That makes a massive fucking difference, because not every disease out there is appropriate for germ warfare or bioterrorism. Think about it: there is no known cure for chronic wasting disease or any other prion disease. But because you have to actually ingest prions to be infected by them, their bioweapon potential is limited.

Did I mention any chronic wasting disease? No I brought up two examples of global pandemics one of which was highly infectious but only moderatly lethal and one which was moderately infectious and highly lethal.

The 1918 spanish flu has been extinct for almost a century. No researcher who currently has access to the remaining samples is going to just hand them to a terrorist or rouge state, and there are controls in place if any of them were nuts enough to try. What makes for a good plot on Numbers is something real institutions would like to prevent. Likewise, Bird Flu is known to be nowhere near as contagious as the Spanish flu, as he admits in his own post. Can you change that? Sure, but again you would need access to the samples.

The research is published, there were cases in the Middle East of Bird Flu infections, so yes Syria would have access to Bird Flu samples. I do not hint or suggest or imply in any way they have made the slightest attempt to do anything with said samples. The point is that if Assad wanted a bio-weapon he has the materials in country so to speak. However there is no indications of any kind of Syrian bioweapons project. But the original post was about how much you Formless did not believe that a bioweapon could be anywhere near as effective as claims made not any hypothetical Syrian weapon.

Furthermore, Bird Flu's failure to cause a catastrophic pandemic goes to show how effective modern institutions like the CDC are at establishing quarantine before a pandemic can arise. And they got this good precisely because diseases are a natural phenomenon. SARS, swine flu... in fact, basically ever Flu or similar disease that people were worried would become the next Spanish flu from the last decade was squashed similarly quickly before they could do real damage. Are you perhaps starting to see the media narrative at work?

Wait, there are two claims here. Either Bird Flu is not that big a deal or it was a big deal but the CDC did it's job well. You've presented both cases that the CDC could stop a pandemic and that pandemic fears themselves are overblown.

These are contradictory.
Also as Sea Skimmer pointed out, a real bioweapon prevents effective quarantines from being put in place because your infecting twenty million people not two thousand. You can lock down two thousand people but not twenty million.

And of course, aerosolizing a disease doesn't mean you have a delivery system. Its half of a delivery system. The other half is the aircraft that carries the aerosol-bomb over the target area. Only now the question arises, what about this is any more or less terrifying than a plane carrying nerve agents? ...which was the point I was trying to make, and had ignored.

That is why you fail, Bean Brain.

I'll note simply that others in the thread have already responded to the rest of your points no need to repeat what Skimmer and the rest have said. The difference is when Sea Skimmer says something you calmly accept it, when I say the same thing ten hours eariler you flip your shit.

Have you not noticed this trend?

[ryacko]

Why would they do it artificially? What makes people think that it is desirable in a bioweapon for it to be so infective and indiscriminate that the people releasing it cannot keep it from infecting friendly populations? Certainly no terrorist would use it, as the goals of terrorism are to promote an ideology or further a political cause.

Or because they think their god wants them to. If anything, we've been saved by the fact that religious fanatics are almost never found in the biological sciences; they've got plenty of engineers (thus all those terrorist bombs), but few if any biologists.

Man, I really hate this one. Even suicide cults keep the killing within the cult. Why the hell do people think this is a valid concern? Are people just too immature to think about religious people and their motivations rationally?

I mean, what are you going to do? Deny religious people from learning microbiology? Yeah, that'll convert 'em from their fanaticism.

Fuck you. Moron.

I thought the concept of forced evolution went against intelligent design.

[Formless]

You really need a new tune Formless. You play this game every few weeks with someone, you make broad sweeping claims. You have said claims refuted and corrected and you get offended when this is pointed out. Because Formless knows all and sees all and the possibly of being in error about any statement is impossible.

I'm sorry, what was that Bean Brain? For someone so confident in his understanding of who he is talking to, you can't even seem to understand basic english:

What isn't said in Bean's little glimps of inanity is that none of that has to do with weaponized diseases. That makes a massive fucking difference, because not every disease out there is appropriate for germ warfare or bioterrorism.

Did I mention any chronic wasting disease? No I brought up two examples of global pandemics one of which was highly infectious but only moderatly lethal and one which was moderately infectious and highly lethal.

I have taken the liberty of removing the part that your pea brain fixated on so as to highlight the actual point you thoroughly missed. Everyone else understood that the example given of prions was to demonstrate a principle; that not every pathogen which can be weaponized is going to be attractive to weaponeers. I suggest you read my exchange with Simon, because I can hardly believe you read the rest of the conversation in detail before responding to me. For instance, there is an explanation in there for why the potential for a pandemic is in fact NOT a good trait for a weapon of terror, and some of the context which made the 1918 flu so deadly beyond the virus's natural infectivity. On that note, I'm just going to skip ahead to avoid repetition.

Wait, there are two claims here. Either Bird Flu is not that big a deal or it was a big deal but the CDC did it's job well. You've presented both cases that the CDC could stop a pandemic and that pandemic fears themselves are overblown.

These are contradictory.

No, you illiterate. I said that the threat of pandemic is overblown because agencies like the CDC are so good at their jobs that they tend to stop possible pandemics before they happen these days. How idiotic are you? Or is this a "I know Formless better than he knows himself!" kind of stupidity now? It is, isn't it.

Also as Sea Skimmer pointed out, a real bioweapon prevents effective quarantines from being put in place because your infecting twenty million people not two thousand. You can lock down two thousand people but not twenty million.

And Skimmer (who posted long after my initial response to you) also noted that data on this is scarce in the public domain, that the data on dispersal range is probably being optomistic with its figures, and that the death toll would be in spite of a low death rate. I read all of Skimmers posts, you understand, not just the parts that agree with me. But like I already said, I don't believe you really read the rest of the conversation very deeply.

I'll note simply that others in the thread have already responded to the rest of your points no need to repeat what Skimmer and the rest have said. The difference is when Sea Skimmer says something you calmly accept it, when I say the same thing ten hours eariler you flip your shit.

Have you not noticed this trend?

What I have noticed is that when you posted earlier, your point hinged upon the existence of the spanish Flu and the ease at which an aerosolizer can be made. Skimmer said nothing about the Spanish flu, and actually gave numbers for how far an airplane could disperse an infectious aerosol. In other words, his post had actual substance to it, whereas you have just been reduced to latching onto his posts for credibility because you have none of your own. You honestly want me to believe that you read the rest of the conversation, but have shown no signs of doing anything more than skimming for bits you agree with. That too is a trend I have noticed.

But keep blowing smoke, you adorable, illiterate Bean Brain. Its hilarious to watch you squirm inside.