OT: Ping Fred III

Totally overblown threat, don't believe a word of it. This is not 1918, and a lot of the ineffective if not damaging practices of that era are avoided.

You need to look beyond that one article. The most immediate threat today is not some novel form of bird flu, or AGW, but rather the totally unregulated world of bedroom anarchists with cheap Chinese PCR machines designing new, bespoke, cut & paste viruses.

And how did Cursitor Doom get to learn about this incipient threat?

Presumably the same way that bedroom anarchists learn how to make new viruses that are both deadly enough to worry about, but not deadly enough to kill the people they infect before they can be relied on to infect at least one more victim.

Cursitor Doom's fertile imagination can come up with any numbers of threats, but coming up with plausible threats is a little beyond him.

A little insight:-

A little more insight:-

IIRC it was the autumn of 1921 when an ailing Alf Harmsworth of what would later become IPC first contacted me about running a comic strip based on my valiant fight against bigotry, evil and ignorance. I told him, "Sure, go nuts." And the rest is history. :-)

Don't believe a word of that stupid ignorant crap. Nothing bests invention and reinvention of new microbial entities than processes of mutation alread y present in nature. And these processes are not a rarity looking for the i nfrequent stroke of good luck, they occur constantly, in very large numbers and relatively quickly. The viruses we know about are truly the product of the school of hard knock s, and any modification to them whatsoever makes for a weaker performer by way of killing the host or just plain surviving. Some semi-retarded sociopath in his/her bedroom with the Chinese PCR machin e is a pathetically impotent actor compared to nature in this respect.

Here's another worry for you:

The Earth is swimming in these things...

Monkeys, typewriters, Shakespeare. The more nutters, the greater the chance one of them will score.

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Er, yeah, whatever. I think you're missing the point here. YOU are the neurotic. WE, the not so anxious types here, are only trying to cheer you up. Sigh....

One duck-and-pig farm in asia probably does a trillion virus recombination experiments per hour.

This also works in our favor in the production of immune system white blood cells. The raw lymphocytes coming out of the bones to be processed by the thymus are also vetted, usually eliminating those that would attack self, a nd randomized to mount a defense against just about anything.

Eeyore's valiant fight against what he imagines to be bigotry, evil and ign orance has lead to him fighting valiantly, if decidedly ineptly, for actual bigotry, evil and ignorance. If he wasn't pig-ignorant he might have notic ed that he was fighting for the wrong side, but then again he might also ha ve been more effective.

For "not so anxious" read "pig-ignorant". The existence of gullible twits, who believe in the nonsense they are peddling doesn't cheer up anybody who isn't equally cognitively challenged.

They are the kind of people who vote for Putin and Trump.