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Weapons of Mass Destruction: Radioactive, Biological, or Chemical weapons capable of causing mass casualties and great destruction.
I wonder why humans aren't on the list?
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Jorge Angeles
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Maybe they'd use biological or chemical weapons instead. Maybe they'd crash the world economy. Maybe they'd turn every program on television into one of those reality shows."
"That's mostly done already, Harry."
"Oh. Well. I've got to believe that the world is worth saving anyway.
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Jim Butcher (Small Favor (The Dresden Files, #10))
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In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weathermen could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened - like a nuclear bomb, or at least a biological weapons attack - an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park to put sandbags around the reservoir.
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Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
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The power of biological weapons is ten times more than the nuclear power. Unless we act fast with an open mind, any one of them can extinct the human race.
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Amit Ray (Nuclear Weapons Free World - Peace on the Earth)
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He had also gone through a bad divorce, become estranged from his only daughter and been diagnosed with skin cancer, but he insisted that all of that, however painful, was secondary to the sudden realization that it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.
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Benjamín Labatut (When We Cease to Understand the World)
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The dark sky.
A hundred million stars.
More stars than I’ve ever seen before. My eyes let me see farther, but they don’t show me the one thing I want to see. I would trade all the stars in the universe if I could just have him back again.
Wind whistles through the trees nearby. Birdsong weaves in and out of the sound.
The hybrids emerge from the communication building, heads tilted to the sky.
And then we see the end.
Godspeed’s engine was nuclear; who knows what fueled the biological weapons. But they explode together. In space, they don’t make the familiar mushroom cloud. They don’t make the boom! of an exploding bomb.
There is, against the dark sky, a brief flash of light. It is filled with colors, like a nebula or the aurora borealis, bursting like a popped bubble.
Nothing else—no sound of an explosion, no tremors in the earth, no smell of smoke. Not here, on the surface of the planet.
Nothing else to signify Elder’s death.
Just light.
And then it’s gone.
And then he’s gone.
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Beth Revis (Shades of Earth (Across the Universe, #3))
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We can’t go on much longer morally. We can’t go on much longer scientifically. The technology that was supposed to save us is ready to destroy us. New weapons are being made all the time, including chemical and biological weapons. Today the only bright spot on the horizon of this world is the promise of the coming again of Christ.
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Billy Graham (Billy graham in quotes)
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That present she left in the bathroom was special. It's not a funk, it's a biological weapon. The Pentagon should be taking notes.
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Gasmaskman
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Arafat had said that the womb of the Palestinian woman was a "biological weapon," which he could use to create Palestine state by crowding people into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
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Yasser Arafat
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I laughed. 'You almighty Andalites. There is no limit to your arrogance, is there? Well, let me tell you something: we may be simple people. But we don't use biology to invent monsters. And we don't enslave other species. And we don't unleash a plague of parasites on the galaxy, endangering every other free species, and then go swaggering around like the lords of the universe. No, we're too simple for that. We're too stupid to lie and manipulate. We're too stupid to be ruthless. We're too stupid to know how to build powerful weapons designed to annihilate our enemies. Until you came, Andalite, we were too stupid to know how to kill.' -Dak Hamee
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Katherine Applegate (The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (Animorphs Chronicles, #2))
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Real arms races are run by highly intelligent, bespectacled engineers in glass offices thoughtfully designing shiny weapons on modern computers. But there's no thinking in the mud and cold of nature's trenches. At best, weapons thrown together amidst the explosions and confusion of smoky battlefields are tiny variations on old ones, held together by chewing gum. If they don't work, then something else is thrown at the enemy, including the kitchen sink - there's nothing "progressive" about that. At its usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition. If the enemy can be stopped or slowed by burning your own bridges and bombing your own radio towers and oil refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench warfare does not lead to progress - it leads back to the Stone Age.
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Michael J. Behe (The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism)
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It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons
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Rachel Carson
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Anti-blackness, in a biological sense, then produces its own anti-whiteness. An illness of the mind, weaponized onto the body of the nation.
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Jonathan M. Metzl (Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland)
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The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.
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Bert Hölldobler, Edward Wilson
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The transition between our current Type 0 civilization and a future Type I civilization is perhaps the greatest transition in history. It will determine whether we will continue to thrive and flourish, or perish due to our own folly. This transition is extremely dangerous because we still have all the barbaric savagery that typified our painful rise from the swamp. Peel back the veneer of civilization, and we still see the forces of fundamentalism, sectarianism, racism, intolerance, etc., at work. Human nature has not changed much in the past 100,000 years, except now we have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to settle old scores.
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Michio Kaku (Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100)
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A world without rape would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent...Rather than society's abberants or"spoilers of purity," men who rape have serves in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorists guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.
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Susan Brownmiller
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There is nothing new about prophecies to the effect that the end of the world is near if we do not repent. What is new is that such a prophecy is now true, for two obvious reasons. First, nuclear weapons give us the means to wipe ourselves out quickly: no humans possessed this means before. Second, we already appropriate about forty per cent of the Earth’s net productivity (that is, the net energy captured from sunlight). With the world’s human population now doubling every forty-one years, we will soon have reached the biological limit to growth, at which point we will have to start fighting each other in deadly earnest for a slice of the world’s fixed pie of resources. In addition, given the present rate at which we are exterminating species, most of the world’s species will become extinct or endangered within the next century, but we depend on many species for our own life support.
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Jared Diamond (The Rise And Fall Of The Third Chimpanzee: how our animal heritage affects the way we live)
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By the spring of 2004 it was evident that the Iraq war’s casus belli had been grounded in false intelligence reporting about Saddam Hussein’s possession of biological and nuclear weapons. Press leaks from the White House fingered George Tenet’s C.I.A. for this embarrassment
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Steve Coll (Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016)
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The official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes unanimously brand as nonsensical the idea that there exists a single objective truth valid for everybody. The criterion of "truth," they say, is not agreement with reality, but agreement with the spirit of a race or nation or class—that is, racial, national or utilitarian. Pushing to their limits the biological, pragmatist, activist theories of truth, the official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes deny the inherent value of thought. For them thought is not a light but a weapon: its function, they say, is not to discover reality as it is, but to change and transform it with the purpose of leading us towards what is not. Such being the case, myth is better than science and rhetoric that works on the passions preferable to proof that appeals to the intellect.
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Alexandre Koyré (Réflexions sur le mensonge)
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Effective antibiotics are a linchpin of modern medicine; without them, it all falls apart. We are financing the creation of virulent biological weapons that one day may be turned against us. This alone should be sufficient reason to create more hygienic conditions for animals.
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John Durant (The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health)
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Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatoza attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese-twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the reveling cosmos. (Yes, our DNA is unique, but so is a salamander's. Yes, we construct artifacts, but so have species ranging from beavers to the architecture ants... Yes, we weave real fabric things from the dreamstuff of mathematics, but the universe is hardwired with arithmetic. Scratch a circle and pi peeps out. Enter a new solar system and Tycho Brahe's formulae lie waiting under the black velvet cloak of space/time. But where has the universe hidden a word under its outer layer of biology, geometry, or insensate rock?)
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Dan Simmons
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The Denarians want to disrupt civilization, and with the Archive under their control, they could do it. Maybe they’d use biological or chemical weapons instead. Maybe they’d crash the world economy. Maybe they’d turn every program on television into one of those reality shows.” “That’s mostly done already, Harry.
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Jim Butcher (Small Favor (The Dresden Files, #10))
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The CIA’s job was to tell presidents about dangerous surprises, it was that simple. This led Tenet quickly to the threat of terrorism, missiles, and weapons of mass destruction. Through discussions at the White House he absorbed and then recapitulated Clinton’s own emerging obsessions with terrorism and especially biological weapons.
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Steve Coll (Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan & Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001)
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the group listed dangerous insufficiencies that DARPA had to shore up at once: “Inadequate nuclear, BW, CW [biological weapon, chemical weapon] detection; inadequate underground bunker detection; limited secure, real-time command and control to lower-echelon units [i.e., getting the information to soldiers on the ground]; limited ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] and dissemination; inadequate mine, booby trap and explosive detection capabilities; inadequate non-lethal capabilities [i.e., incapacitating agents]; inadequate modeling/simulation for training, rehearsal and operations; no voice recognition or language translation; inadequate ability to deal with sniper attacks.
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Annie Jacobsen (The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency)
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These days about the worst job you can have is be a US military man. It's so shameful. You're so expensive, yet so completely useless. You know you can't fuck with Russia because they'll just start blowing nukes up for shits and giggles. And you can fuck with China because they probably have a shitton of biological weapons stashed in every Chinatown to take out most US population very, very quickly. At least that’s what I would do, and THEY are a lot smarter than I am. So you keep busy and pretend to be useful by killing Arabs in caves and shit, cuz that seems like a pretty low risk adventure. but... even that's gonna come back and bite you in the Ass eventually... these things usually do...
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Dmitry Dyatlov
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Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral, and it has led, indeed, to all kinds of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of imperialistic ideologies. In the seventies and eighties of the last century, Darwinism was still almost exclusively in the hands of the utilitarian anti-colonial party in England. And the first philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer, who treated sociology as part of biology, believed natural selection to benefit the evolution of mankind and to result in everlasting peace. For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic "survival of the fittest," and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new "science" of eugenics.
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Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
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Granddaddy’s squirrel gun is not going to get it when faced with their computerized advancements, harmonics, ELF waves, biologicals, nuclear capacity and so on. Still, we better hang on to our weapons just because they are hell-bent on taking them away. They must feel threatened by them. Besides, being armed with truth and weapons is a powerful combination.
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Cathy O'Brien (ACCESS DENIED For Reasons Of National Security: Documented Journey From CIA Mind Control Slave To U.S. Government Whistleblower)
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The IRF had just been completed, after nine years of construction. The facility is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which in turn is a part of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. The IRF’s mission is to develop experimental drugs and vaccines, called medical countermeasures, that could defeat lethal emerging viruses and advanced biological weapons.
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Richard Preston (Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come)
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Rabid Chinese ideologists who point nuclear, chemical and biological weapons at us must have their reasons. And who is to say what their definition of victory might be? A smoldering wreck of a world, under firm totalitarian control, might be their ultimate aim. After all, communists have wrecked their own and other countries again and again without even using nuclear weapons.
“Origins of the Fourth World War
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J.R. Nyquist
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The Europeans unwittingly brought a biological weapon with them that gave the invaders a brutal advantage over their opponents. With no immunity whatsoever to smallpox, Native Americans died in droves when they were exposed to the virus. In Central America, over 90 percent of the native population is believed to have died of smallpox in the decades following the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the early 1500s.
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Carl Zimmer (A Planet of Viruses)
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When we invented fire, we messed up repeatedly, then invented the fire extinguisher. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and strong artificial intelligence, we should instead plan ahead and aim to get things right the first time, because it may be the only chance we will get. Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that wisdom wins.
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Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
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Sometimes I worry about what I will do when the shit goes down. I’m not sure which specific shit I mean. Maybe nuclear shit or biological weapon shit or zombie shit. What if my family is cut off from civilization for an indefinite period of time and it’s my job to take care of everybody? Could I muster the necessary resources to accomplish the task? I actually do know the answer to this question: no. When the shit goes down, my family will be the first to die.
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Michael Ian Black (You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations)
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I know “professional” historians like to talk about how Yonkers represented a “catastrophic failure of the modern military apparatus,” how it proved the old adage that armies perfect the art of fighting the last war just in time for the next one. Personally, I think that’s a big ’ole sack of it. Sure, we were unprepared, our tools, our training, everything I just talked about, all one class-A, gold-standard clusterfuck, but the weapon that really failed wasn’t something that rolled off an assembly line. It’s as old as…I don’t know, I guess as old as war. It’s fear, dude, just fear and you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day. Break their spirit, that’s what every successful army goes for, from tribal face paint to the “blitzkrieg” to…what did we call the first round of Gulf War Two, “Shock and Awe”? Perfect name, “Shock and Awe”! But what if the enemy can’t be shocked and awed? Not just won’t, but biologically can’t! That’s what happened that day outside New York City, that’s the failure that almost lost us the whole damn war. The fact that we couldn’t shock and awe Zack boomeranged right back in our faces and actually allowed Zack to shock and awe us! They’re not afraid! No matter what we do, no matter how many we kill, they will never, ever be afraid!
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Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
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To understand that,’ Dombey said, ‘you have to go back twenty months. It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, carrying a diskette record of China’s most important and dangerous new biological weapon in a decade. They call the stuff “Wuhan-400” because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center.
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Dean Koontz (The Eyes of Darkness)
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This combination of incompetence and accidents led to increasing public hostility toward chemical weapons. After all, it was argued, if a few pounds of nerve agent was sufficient to kill 6,000 sheep, what would be the consequence of a full-scale accident?
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Robert Harris (A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare)
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As to the efficacy of the policy recommended by Rostow, it speaks for itself: no country, once underdeveloped, ever managed to develop By Rostow's stages. Is that why Rostow is now trying to help the people of Vietnam, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and other underdeveloped countries to overcome the empirical, theoretical, and policy shortcomings of his manifestly non-communist intellectual aid to economic development and cultural change by bombs, napalm, chemical and biological weapons, and military occupation?
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André Gunder Frank (América Latina: Subdesarrrollo o Revolucioón)
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The policies the US government is following are dangerous for its citizens. It's true that you can bomb or buy out anybody that you want to, but you can't control the rage that's building in the world. You just can't. And that rage will express itself in some way or the other. Condemning violence when a section of your economy is based on selling weapons and making bombs and piling up chemical and biological weapons? When the soul of your culture worships violence? On what grounds are you going to condemn terrorism, unless you change your attitude toward violence?
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Arundhati Roy (The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy)
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THERE IS ONE type of honey you should avoid at all costs. Mad honey comes from bees that forage on rhododendrons and mountain laurel, and it’s full of poisonous grayanotoxins. It causes dizziness, nausea and vomiting, convulsions, cardiac disorders, and more. Symptoms last for twenty-four hours, and although rarely, if left untreated, can be fatal. It has been used in biological warfare as far back as 399 b.c., to make Xenophon and the Greek army retreat from Persia. During the Third Mithridatic War in 65 b.c., citizens of Pontus placed mad honey on the route taken by Pompey’s soldiers, and when the enemy helped themselves to the treat, they were easily conquered. The secret weapon of mad honey, of course, is that you expect it to be sweet, not deadly. You’re deliberately attracted to it. By the time it messes with your head, with your heart, it’s too late.
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Jodi Picoult (Mad Honey)
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The prince of this world is the father of lies, and his followers are legion. Those who control the narrative might in fact decouple Ringrock from the explosion, might claim terrorists were ferrying the nuke from this lake to the next, with whatever city as their target, when it detonated prematurely. Such a lie, sold by the highest authorities, will not only cover up the reckless project at Ringrock as if it never existed, but will also provide them with an excuse to restrict freedoms and further consolidate power. The end of Moloch might be only the beginning of something else as dark and menacing as that biological weapon from the stars.
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Dean Koontz (The House at the End of the World)
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The goal of Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee was to investigate all things related to German science. Target types ran the gamut: radar, missiles, aircraft, medicine, bombs and fuses, chemical and biological weapons labs. And while CIOS remained an official joint venture, there were other groups in the mix, with competing interests at hand. Running parallel to CIOS operations were dozens of secret intelligence-gathering operations, mostly American. The Pentagon’s Special Mission V-2 was but one example. By late March 1945, Colonel Trichel, chief of U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, had dispatched his team to Europe. Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels. Sometimes, the members of these parallel missions worked in consort with CIOS officers in the field.
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Annie Jacobsen (Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America)
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Anthropologists, studying everyone from hunter-gatherers to urbanites, have found that about two thirds of everyday conversation is gossip, with the vast majority of it being negative. As has been said, gossip (with the goal of shaming) is a weapon of the weak against the powerful. It has always been fast and cheap and is infinitely more so now in the era of the Scarlet Internet.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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When Davis finally went back and turned the flashlight on, he saw that the walls near the door were dented and pitted—the telltale marks left by fragments of explosives. “You have been using explosives here,” he declared. “No, no,” Petukhov insisted. “Those marks come from the hammers we had to use to make the door fit when we were constructing the building. It was poorly made by our factory, you see.
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Ken Alibek (Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It)
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The Melding Plague attacked our society at the core. It was not quite a biological virus, not quite a software virus, but a strange and shifting chimera of the two. No pure strain of the plague has ever been isolated, but in its pure form it must resemble a kind of nano-machinery, analogous to the molecular-scale assemblers of our own medichine technology. That it must be of alien origin seems beyond doubt. Equally clear is the fact that nothing we have thrown against the plague has done more than slow it. More often than not, our interventions have only made things worse. The plague adapts to our attacks; it perverts our weapons and turns them against us. Some kind of buried intelligence seems to guide it. We don’t know whether the plague was directed toward humanity—or whether we have just been terribly unlucky.
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Alastair Reynolds (Chasm City)
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By now, certain alternate theories are beginning to circulate online. It's the government, they say. Or it's Big Pharma. Some kind of germ must have gotten loose from a lab at the college.
Think about it, they say: Do you really believe that a completely new virus could show up in the most powerful country on earth without scientists knowing exactly what it is? They probably engineered it themselves. They might be spreading this thing on purpose, testing out a biological weapon. They might be withholding the cure.
Or maybe there's no sickness at all—that's what some have begun posting online. Isn't Santa Lora the perfect location for a hoax? An isolated town, surrounded by forest, only one road in and one road out. And those people you see on TV? Those could be hired victims. Those could be crisis actors paid to play their parts. And the supposedly sick? Come on, how hard is it to pretend you're asleep?
Maybe, a few begin to say, Santa Lora is not even a real town. Has anyone ever heard of this place? And look it up: there's no such saint as Santa Lora. It's made-up. The whole damn place is probably just a set on some back lot in Culver City. Don't those houses look a little too quaint?
Don't be naïve, say others—they don't need a set. All that footage is probably just streaming out of some editing room in the valley. If you look closely, you can tell that some of those houses repeat.
Now just ask yourself, they say, who stands to benefit from all this. It always comes back to money, right? The medical-industrial complex. And who do you think pays the salaries of these so-called journalists reporting all this fake news? Just watch: in a few months, Big Pharma will be selling the vaccine.
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Karen Thompson Walker (The Dreamers)
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Since leaving Moscow I have encountered an alarming level of ignorance about biological weapons. Some of the best scientists I've encountered in the West say it isn't possible to alter viruses genetically to make reliable weapons, or to store enough of a give pathogen for strategic purposes, or to deliver it in a way that assures maximum killing power. My knowledge and experience tell me that they are wrong. I have written this book to explain why.
There are some who maintain that discussing the subject will cause needless alarm. But existing defenses against these weapons are dangerously inadequate, and when biological terror strikes, as I am convinced it will, public ignorance will only heighten the disaster. The first step we must take to protect ourselves is to understand what biological weapons are and how they work. The alternative is to remain as helpless as the monkeys in the Aral Sea.
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Ken Alibek (Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It)
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For starters, of the four so-called weapons of mass destruction, three are far less massively destructive than good old-fashioned explosives.272 Radiological or “dirty” bombs, which are conventional explosives wrapped in radioactive material (obtained, for example, from medical waste), would yield only minor and short-lived elevations of radiation, comparable to moving to a city at a higher altitude. Chemical weapons, unless they are released in an enclosed space like a subway (where they would still not do as much damage as conventional explosives), dissipate quickly, drift in the wind, and are broken down by sunlight. (Recall that poison gas was responsible for a tiny fraction of the casualties in World War I.) Biological weapons capable of causing epidemics would be prohibitively expensive to develop and deploy, as well as dangerous to the typically bungling amateur labs that would develop them.
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Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity)
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This Cinderella ecology isn’t so new in Britain. The last windfall of sites for rare natives and exotic invaders happened after bombs dropped on London and elsewhere in World War II. The profusion of unexpected species that populated the craters was so great that it was rumored they had been dropped with the bombs as biological weapons of war.7 The Moroccan poppy and the American willow herb were both first spotted in Britain in the remains of bombed-out buildings in the City of London and subsequently spread across Britain. Those were good times for thorn apple from North America and rosebay willow herb from the Yukon, which was nicknamed “bombweed” by Cockney Londoners. Some were newcomers, but many were old arrivals. The daisy-like gallant soldier, its common name a corruption of its Latin name Galinsoga parviflora, came to Kew Gardens from Peru in the 1790s but proliferated unexpectedly in the bomb craters.
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Fred Pearce (The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation)
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The world has been changing even faster as people, devices and information are increasingly connected to each other. Computational power is growing and quantum computing is quickly being realised. This will revolutionise artificial intelligence with exponentially faster speeds. It will advance encryption. Quantum computers will change everything, even human biology. There is already one technique to edit DNA precisely, called CRISPR. The basis of this genome-editing technology is a bacterial defence system. It can accurately target and edit stretches of genetic code. The best intention of genetic manipulation is that modifying genes would allow scientists to treat genetic causes of disease by correcting gene mutations. There are, however, less noble possibilities for manipulating DNA. How far we can go with genetic engineering will become an increasingly urgent question. We can’t see the possibilities of curing motor neurone diseases—like my ALS—without also glimpsing its dangers.
Intelligence is characterised as the ability to adapt to change. Human intelligence is the result of generations of natural selection of those with the ability to adapt to changed circumstances. We must not fear change. We need to make it work to our advantage.
We all have a role to play in making sure that we, and the next generation, have not just the opportunity but the determination to engage fully with the study of science at an early level, so that we can go on to fulfil our potential and create a better world for the whole human race. We need to take learning beyond a theoretical discussion of how AI should be and to make sure we plan for how it can be. We all have the potential to push the boundaries of what is accepted, or expected, and to think big. We stand on the threshold of a brave new world. It is an exciting, if precarious, place to be, and we are the pioneers.
When we invented fire, we messed up repeatedly, then invented the fire extinguisher. With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and strong artificial intelligence, we should instead plan ahead and aim to get things right the first time, because it may be the only chance we will get. Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that wisdom wins.
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Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
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We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia- because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal," or they will unmake our world.
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Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)
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The situation with regard to insulin is particularly clear. In many parts of the world diabetic children still die from lack of this hormone. ... [T]hose of us who search for new biological facts and for new and better therapeutic weapons should appreciate that one of the central problems of the world is the more equitable distribution and use of the medical and nutritional advances which have already been established. The observations which I have recently made in parts of Africa and South America have brought this fact very forcible to my attention.
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Charles Herbert Best
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A philosopher/mathematician named Bertrand Russell who lived and died in the same century as Gass once wrote: “Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” Here is the essence of mankind’s creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese-twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos. (Yes, our DNA is unique but so is a salamander’s. Yes, we construct artifacts but so have species ranging from beavers to the architect ants whose crenellated towers are visible right now off the port bow. Yes, we weave real-fabric things from the dreamstuff of mathematics, but the universe is hardwired with arithmetic. Scratch a circle and π peeps out. Enter a new solar system and Tycho Brahe’s formulae lie waiting under the black velvet cloak of space/time. But where has the universe hidden a word under its outer layer of biology, geometry, or insensate rock?)
”
”
Dan Simmons (Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1))
“
It may be hard to convince ourselves that something we can't see, hear, touch, taste, or smell can still hurt us so dreadfully. Yet the fact must be faced, just as we've learned a healthy fear of nuclear radiation. Certain scientists, some perhaps acting in a program of deliberate disinformation, keep telling the public that we still don't know whether electropollution is a threat to human health. That's simply not true. Certainly we need to know more, but a multitude of risks have been well documented.
Three dangers overshadow all others. The first has been conclusively proven: ELF electromagnetic fields vibrating at about 30 to 100 hertz, even if they're weaker than the earth's field, interfere with the cues that keep our biological cycles properly timed; chronic stress and impaired disease resistance result. Second, the available evidence strongly suggests that regulation of cellular growth processes is impaired by electropollution, increasing cancer rates and producing serious reproductive problems. Electromagnetic weapons constitute a third class of hazards culminating in climatic manipulation from a sorcerer's-apprentice level of ignorance.
”
”
Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
“
In 1938 the biological warfare establishment Unit 731 had been set up outside Harbin in Manchukuo, under the auspices of the Kwantung Army. This huge complex, presided over by General Ishii Shir, eventually employed a core staff of 3,000 scientists and doctors from universities and medical schools in Japan, and a total of 20,000 personnel in the subsidiary establishments. They prepared weapons to spread black plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera, and tested them on more than 3,000 Chinese prisoners. They also carried out anthrax, mustard-gas and frostbite experiments on their victims, whom they referred to as maruta or ‘logs’.
”
”
Antony Beevor (The Second World War)
“
Like any form of Art, literature's mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable. For a creature like man, who must forge his destiny by means of thought and reflexivity, the knowledge gained from this will perforce be unbearably lucid. We know that we are beasts who have this weapon for survival, and that we are not gods creating a world with our own thoughts, and something has to make our own wisdom bearable, something has to save us from the woeful eternal fever of biological destiny. Therefore, we have invented Art: our animal selves have devised another way to ensure the survival of our species.
”
”
Muriel Barbery
“
The visitors were allowed to wander in the corridors until they came to a closed door. “What’s in here?” Davis asked. No one answered. “Could you please open it?” “We lost the key,” Petukhov mumbled. “I’ll see if I can find a copy.” While the visitors waited impatiently, Petukhov took his time finding a “new” key. He eventually opened the door, but the room was dark. “Can you turn the light on?” Davis asked in irritation. “Not possible,” Petukhov said. “The bulb is out.” Undeterred, Davis walked right past him and pulled out a flashlight. At that moment, the façade of international cooperation ended. Petukhov lunged for the flashlight. Davis shouted. The two men tussled back and forth until someone suggested that they take the dispute back to the conference room, where I was awaiting their return.
”
”
Ken Alibek (Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It)
“
On 1 November 1983 Secretary of State George Shultz received intelligence reports showing that Iraq was using chemical weapons almost daily. The following February, Iraq used large amounts of mustard gas and also the lethal nerve agent tabun (this was later documented by the United Nations); Reagan responded (in November) by restoring diplomatic relations with Iraq. He and Bush Sr. also authorized the sale of poisonous chemicals, anthrax, and bubonic plague. Along with French supply houses, American Type Culture Collection of Manassas, Virginia, shipped seventeen types of biological agents to Iraq that were then used in weapons programs. In 1989, ABC-TV news correspondent Charles Glass discovered what the U.S. government had been denying, that Iraq had biological warfare facilities. This was corroborated by evidence from a defecting Iraqi general. The Pentagon immediately denied the facts.
”
”
Morris Berman (Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire)
“
But the god himself in the book of Job, does he concern us? Is it all but a poetic play with a strange and too old-fashioned conception of God? Do we know this god? Well, we know him from the history of religion, he is the god of the old testament, the army of the armies, or as we would say, the army god, the jealous Yahweh. But does he only live in the history of religion? No, he also reigns in our experience, today as before 2400 years ago. He represents a well-known biological and social environment: the blind forces of nature that are without contact with man's drive towards order and meaning, of disease and the erratic impact of death, the fleetingness of fame, betrayal of friends and relatives. He is the machine and the god of power, domination of violence, party slavery and conquest alike, the god of copper pipes and armor plates. There are more than Job, who meets him with the weapon of the spirit. Some of them being trampled into heroic martyrdom; others also see the limitation of marty reed, they bend inwardly, but hide for the doubt in their heart.
”
”
Peter Wessel Zapffe (Essays)
“
Timeline of History Years Before the Present 13.5 billion Matter and energy appear. Beginning of physics. Atoms and molecules appear. Beginning of chemistry. 4.5 billion Formation of planet Earth. 3.8 billion Emergence of organisms. Beginning of biology. 6 million Last common grandmother of humans and chimpanzees. 2.5 million Evolution of the genus Homo in Africa. First stone tools. 2 million Humans spread from Africa to Eurasia. Evolution of different human species. 500,000 Neanderthals evolve in Europe and the Middle East. 300,000 Daily usage of fire. 200,000 Homo sapiens evolves in East Africa. 70,000 The Cognitive Revolution. Emergence of fictive language. Beginning of history. Sapiens spread out of Africa. 45,000 Sapiens settle Australia. Extinction of Australian megafauna. 30,000 Extinction of Neanderthals. 16,000 Sapiens settle America. Extinction of American megafauna. 13,000 Extinction of Homo floresiensis. Homo sapiens the only surviving human species. 12,000 The Agricultural Revolution. Domestication of plants and animals. Permanent settlements. 5,000 First kingdoms, script and money. Polytheistic religions. 4,250 First empire – the Akkadian Empire of Sargon. 2,500 Invention of coinage – a universal money. The Persian Empire – a universal political order ‘for the benefit of all humans’. Buddhism in India – a universal truth ‘to liberate all beings from suffering’. 2,000 Han Empire in China. Roman Empire in the Mediterranean. Christianity. 1,400 Islam. 500 The Scientific Revolution. Humankind admits its ignorance and begins to acquire unprecedented power. Europeans begin to conquer America and the oceans. The entire planet becomes a single historical arena. The rise of capitalism. 200 The Industrial Revolution. Family and community are replaced by state and market. Massive extinction of plants and animals. The Present Humans transcend the boundaries of planet Earth. Nuclear weapons threaten the survival of humankind. Organisms are increasingly shaped by intelligent design rather than natural selection. The Future Intelligent design becomes the basic principle of life? Homo sapiens is replaced by superhumans?
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
It may be hard to convince ourselves that something we can't see, hear, touch, taste, or smell can still hurt us so dreadfully. Yet the fact must be faced, just as we've learned a healthy fear of nuclear radiation. Certain scientists, some perhaps acting in a program of deliberate disinformation, keep telling the public that we still don't know whether electropollution is a threat to human health. That's simply not true. Certainly we need to know more, but a multitude of risks have been well documented.
Three dangers overshadow all others. The first has been conclusively proven: ELF electromagnetic fields vibrating at about 30 to 100 hertz, even if they're weaker than the earth's field, interfere with the cues that keep our biological cycles properly timed; chronic stress and impaired disease resistance result. Second, the available evidence strongly suggests that regulation of cellular growth processes is impaired by electropollution, increasing cancer rates and producing serious reproductive problems. Electromagnetic weapons constitute a third class of hazards culminating in climatic manipulation from a sorcerer's-apprentice level of ignorance.
”
”
Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
“
Many mothers don't want to appear vulnerable, both our of fear of being diminished, infantilized, or threatened with unwanted interventions, and because they know they are almost solely in charge of keeping a new human being alive. Who the hell has time for vulnerability? It is a profound testament to the strength and resilience of women that so many of them suffer from debilitating fear, sadness, and confusion and yet they soldier on working, taking care of their families, getting the myriad everyday chores done. The fact that they're asked to do so, to carry and bear alone not only the child but the chemical and biological shifts, the solitude, the loss, the grief, the complex questions of their own transformation, reveals a society that values mothers only as passive, docile, keeping their motherhood safely tucked in the sentimental cultural space reserved for it. The idea is not to study the mother, to listen to her, to recognize her in her fullness, to explore her becoming, but to keep her contained: prevent her from causing harm, encourage her to follow the rules. Anxiety is an excellent weapon for containing women; it needs only to be gently stoked in the context of pregnancy and women will weaponize it against themselves.
”
”
Sarah Menkedick (Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America)
“
A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE CAN GO A LONG WAY
A LOT OF PROFESSIONALS ARE CRACKPOTS
A MAN CAN'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE A MOTHER
A NAME MEANS A LOT JUST BY ITSELF
A POSITIVE ATTITUDE MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD
A RELAXED MAN IS NOT NECESSARILY A BETTER MAN
A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF GENIUS
A SINCERE EFFORT IS ALL YOU CAN ASK
A SINGLE EVENT CAN HAVE INFINITELY MANY INTERPRETATIONS
A SOLID HOME BASE BUILDS A SENSE OF SELF
A STRONG SENSE OF DUTY IMPRISONS YOU
ABSOLUTE SUBMISSION CAN BE A FORM OF FREEDOM
ABSTRACTION IS A TYPE OF DECADENCE
ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE
ACTION CAUSES MORE TROUBLE THAN THOUGHT
ALIENATION PRODUCES ECCENTRICS OR REVOLUTIONARIES
ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED
AMBITION IS JUST AS DANGEROUS AS COMPLACENCY
AMBIVALENCE CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE
AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE
ANGER OR HATE CAN BE A USEFUL MOTIVATING FORCE
ANIMALISM IS PERFECTLY HEALTHY
ANY SURPLUS IS IMMORAL
ANYTHING IS A LEGITIMATE AREA OF INVESTIGATION
ARTIFICIAL DESIRES ARE DESPOILING THE EARTH
AT TIMES INACTIVITY IS PREFERABLE TO MINDLESS FUNCTIONING
AT TIMES YOUR UNCONSCIOUS IS TRUER THAN YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND
AUTOMATION IS DEADLY
AWFUL PUNISHMENT AWAITS REALLY BAD PEOPLE
BAD INTENTIONS CAN YIELD GOOD RESULTS
BEING ALONE WITH YOURSELF IS INCREASINGLY UNPOPULAR
BEING HAPPY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING ELSE
BEING JUDGMENTAL IS A SIGN OF LIFE
BEING SURE OF YOURSELF MEANS YOU'RE A FOOL
BELIEVING IN REBIRTH IS THE SAME AS ADMITTING DEFEAT
BOREDOM MAKES YOU DO CRAZY THINGS
CALM IS MORE CONDUCIVE TO CREATIVITY THAN IS ANXIETY
CATEGORIZING FEAR IS CALMING
CHANGE IS VALUABLE WHEN THE OPPRESSED BECOME TYRANTS
CHASING THE NEW IS DANGEROUS TO SOCIETY
CHILDREN ARE THE HOPE OF THE FUTURE
CHILDREN ARE THE MOST CRUEL OF ALL
CLASS ACTION IS A NICE IDEA WITH NO SUBSTANCE
CLASS STRUCTURE IS AS ARTIFICIAL AS PLASTIC
CONFUSING YOURSELF IS A WAY TO STAY HONEST
CRIME AGAINST PROPERTY IS RELATIVELY UNIMPORTANT
DECADENCE CAN BE AN END IN ITSELF
DECENCY IS A RELATIVE THING
DEPENDENCE CAN BE A MEAL TICKET
DESCRIPTION IS MORE VALUABLE THAN METAPHOR
DEVIANTS ARE SACRIFICED TO INCREASE GROUP SOLIDARITY
DISGUST IS THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO MOST SITUATIONS
DISORGANIZATION IS A KIND OF ANESTHESIA
DON'T PLACE TOO MUCH TRUST IN EXPERTS
DRAMA OFTEN OBSCURES THE REAL ISSUES
DREAMING WHILE AWAKE IS A FRIGHTENING CONTRADICTION
DYING AND COMING BACK GIVES YOU CONSIDERABLE PERSPECTIVE
DYING SHOULD BE AS EASY AS FALLING OFF A LOG
EATING TOO MUCH IS CRIMINAL
ELABORATION IS A FORM OF POLLUTION
EMOTIONAL RESPONSES ARE AS VALUABLE AS INTELLECTUAL RESPONSES
ENJOY YOURSELF BECAUSE YOU CAN'T CHANGE ANYTHING ANYWAY
ENSURE THAT YOUR LIFE STAYS IN FLUX
EVEN YOUR FAMILY CAN BETRAY YOU
EVERY ACHIEVEMENT REQUIRES A SACRIFICE
EVERYONE'S WORK IS EQUALLY IMPORTANT
EVERYTHING THAT'S INTERESTING IS NEW
EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE DESERVE SPECIAL CONCESSIONS
EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID
EXPRESSING ANGER IS NECESSARY
EXTREME BEHAVIOR HAS ITS BASIS IN PATHOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
EXTREME SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS LEADS TO PERVERSION
FAITHFULNESS IS A SOCIAL NOT A BIOLOGICAL LAW
FAKE OR REAL INDIFFERENCE IS A POWERFUL PERSONAL WEAPON
FATHERS OFTEN USE TOO MUCH FORCE
FEAR IS THE GREATEST INCAPACITATOR
FREEDOM IS A LUXURY NOT A NECESSITY
GIVING FREE REIN TO YOUR EMOTIONS IS AN HONEST WAY TO LIVE
GO ALL OUT IN ROMANCE AND LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY
GOING WITH THE FLOW IS SOOTHING BUT RISKY
GOOD DEEDS EVENTUALLY ARE REWARDED
GOVERNMENT IS A BURDEN ON THE PEOPLE
GRASS ROOTS AGITATION IS THE ONLY HOPE
”
”
Jenny Holzer
“
The Skull Valley reservation is ringed by toxic and hazardous waste facilities (Figure 1). To the south lies the Dugway Proving Grounds, where the US Army tests chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and other weapons and trains elite members of the US armed forces in their use. To the west is the Utah Test and Training Range, a vast swath of desert the US Air Force uses for target practice by bombers, the testing of cruise missiles, and air-to-air combat training for fighter jets. North and west of the reservation a private company, Enviro Care, landfills 93 percent of the nation's Class A, low-level nuclear waste. East of the reservation sit the Tooele Army Depot, one of the largest weapons depots in the world, and the Deseret Chemical Depot, which until recently was home to nearly 50 percent of the nation's aging stockpile of chemical weapons. From 1996 to 2012 the US Army worked around the clock to incinerate over a million rockets, missiles, and mortars packed with sarin, mustard gas, and other deadly agents.
”
”
James B. Martin-Schramm (Earth Ethics: A Case Method Approach)
“
Possibly, the entire world has become a victim of chemically and biologically warfare by the sadist and evil-minded ones. Indeed, such practices will definitely, and continuously, in its ways, now and after it, to destroy this planet and humanity ruthlessly.
Therefore, the world should forbid medication of homeopathy medicines by homeopathy doctors, who give in their practice offices since it is the utmost danger to the patients as they stay unaware of the accuracy and authenticity of that. In such ways, victimization is possible by the criminals and even International Intelligence Agencies, to harm the health of its opponents in whatever ways and reasons.
All homeopathy medicines should be delivered, through the official and licensed pharmacies since patients can stay secure and safe from the suspicious and disqualified subjects and figures. As a fact, the present way of medication, carries severe risks, as that fails to give information about its ingredients and legal name and expiry date. Indeed, deliberately or not, homeopathy doctors may become life-threatening to those who have problems and conflict with dictatorships in various countries.
Through homeopathy and such other natural treating ways are not under control and observation sufficiently and accurately that may result in grave consequences.
In this regard, I have expressed such concerns, which I physically faced and also suffered from that, even though, I believe, authorities of the global states will understand and investigate seriously in wide-scale, to stop and eliminate creators of biological warfare against humanity for their evil purposes.
It is a core responsibility of all states of the world to take immediate action in this regard to save its peoples from life-threating activities.
Read these below links to realize the real concept and context that humanity is becoming the victim and hunt for biological weapons and warfare.
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
I’m a consultant, advocate, and expert witness for people who are being targeted by covert crimes. The types of crimes that my clients suffer include: being stalked and harassed by groups of people, workplace mobbing, public mobbing, illegal entry into their homes and vehicles, extreme slander, computer and phone hacking, bugging of their homes, phones, etc., constant surveillance, vandalism, biological/chemical assaults, and remote weapons’ assaults.
”
”
Cathy Meadows (Surviving and Thriving as a Targeted Individual: A 25 Page Booklet About How to Beat Covert Surveillance, Gang Stalking, and Harassment)
“
and throughout the summer and fall of 2002, the president and his aides prepared the battlefield of the American mind with apocalyptic warnings about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction: Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons, and it could build a nuclear weapon in a few years. The alarms were terrifying, and utterly false. The cause for war was an illusion.
”
”
Tim Weiner (The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020)
“
Growing crops through chemical processes can be explained through science, but what end they are used for does not come under the domain of science. Chemistry can help in increasing productivity of food crops as well as making chemical weapons. Abortion of a baby without putting life of mother at risk can be explained through biology, but science does not answer whether it is right or wrong. Weapons of mass destruction can be made through knowledge of disciplines like nuclear physics, but using this knowledge to decimate entire human population in a city or country is a decision whose correctness or incorrectness cannot be judged or answered from science.
”
”
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
“
In the 21st century, the devil still tells big lies. In an age of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons capable of eradicating all human life, the way of war is still foolishly romanticized and deemed a legitimate way to shape the world. But Lent is a time to repent, to rethink, to reimagine. Today let us heed the warning of Jesus and remember that there is no way to peace…peace is the way.
”
”
Brian Zahnd (The Unvarnished Jesus: A Lenten Journey)
“
Cyberattacks on nonmilitary, physical infrastructure, Lee believed, were a class of weapon that ought to be considered, along with cluster bombs and biological weapons, simply too dangerous and uncontrollable for any ethical nation to wield.
”
”
Andy Greenberg (Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers)
“
oh Lord. Well what do you want me to say? Yes, I suppose I've become one of these people who get to contemplate the end of the world on a daily basis. I hope you find other qualified applicants. Yes, I think the USA is a threat to global security. Not because they're evil or powerful... but mostly because they're stupid. I've spent a few years researching us Transit systems because they make real good delivery mechanisms for biological weapons.
Just keep doing what you're doing... and we will do our thing too. Is it a good idea to incentivize your women into prostitution (Kathleen parker). No I don't think so. so you see there are these red lines. And I don't know who the fuck knows what they really are. Do I want to be here? Fuck no. I think I would be much safer in Russia. They don't do this stupid shit. I had a girlfriend in Russia. It was nice. that's the truth. Science fiction? Well I don't know. If you take me seriously perhaps some FBI can show up here tomorrow and send me back to Moscow. Why not?
”
”
Dmitry Dyatlov
“
It is sometimes argued that the biologically determined differential success rates of men and women are unjust since, had women been treated fairly over the milennia, the market would have evolved to reward female talents as much as it now rewards male talents. Trying to substantiate a conditional this counterfactual is like trying to determine whether Julius Caesar would have used atomic weapons had they been available 2,000 years ago.
”
”
Michael Levin (Feminism and Freedom)
“
The story of Unit 731 may be the exception: Victor and vanquished colluded to cover up war crimes and genocide carried out with biological weapons.
”
”
David Lockwood (Fooled by the Winners: How Survivor Bias Deceives Us)
“
Sex is taken as a biological given: non-cultural, static and scientifically measurable. Gender, however, is an intangible social concept with a specific contextual construction.
”
”
Tom Neal (Women Warriors in Ancient Egyptian Archaeology: Facts, Myths and Mysteries of Queen Ahhotep of the Pharaoh: A Biography of a Queens Everyday Life + History of Weapons, Art and Jewellery in Her Tomb)
“
Biological weapons under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial.
”
”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
Religion and politics have always been used to acquire and maintain control of resources– Especially human resources such as the military– An industrial complex where human lives are exchanged for wealth and power. All in the name of freedom and independence, of course.”
“Such attitudes lead to devastating conflicts.”
“Yes,” Jon said. “Unfortunately, when negotiations break down, war often erupts.”
“War. A very destructive behavior ingrained in man’s nature due to having evolved in an environment of limited resources.”
“Exactly.”
“According to the records I have seen, this ingrained behavior could destroy practically all living things on this planet using weapons of mass destruction.”
“That is true.”
“Throughout history, people have been led to believe they are on the verge of complete self-destruction, but only in the last century did this become possible with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.”
“That’s religion for you. One of the best ways to get people to listen to you is to frighten them into believing they are about to meet their creator.”
Lex said, “I have seen many instances where organizations and government officials ignore the health and welfare of humans and all other living things in pursuit of profits. Such actions bring great suffering and death.”
“Unfortunately, we have always incorporated profits before people policies, which are very self-destructive.”
He thought, the ego-system. In God, we trust– Gold, oil, and drugs.
“It is a popular belief that God is in absolute control of everything and whatever happens is God’s will.”
He raised a finger to make a point, but Lex continued.
“Looking at the past, would it not be logical to say that it is God’s will for humanity to continue to improve unto perfection?”
“Yes. But God is not responsible for everything. We always have choices. The creator of this universe gave us free will, and it came with a conscience– An inner sense of right and wrong.”
“My conscience was made differently.”
“Yes. But you are bound by rules that clearly define what is right and wrong. For example, it is against your programming to deliberately cause physical harm to any human being.”
“I understand. But what would happen if I did?”
He chose his words carefully.
“If you did– or I should say– if it were possible for you to go against your BASIC programming, there would be severe consequences.”
There was silence for a few seconds before Lex continued.
“It has been said that God is to the world as the mind is to the body. Could this be where man derived the popular explanation that God is two or three separate beings combined into one?”
“Perhaps.”
“All religious beliefs are based on a principal struggle between good and evil. However, like light and darkness, one cannot exist without the other.”
“Which means?”
“One could conclude that the actual struggle between good and evil is in the minds of intellectuals, conscious and subconscious.”
Again, he raised a finger, but Lex continued.
“Which could be resolved by increased knowledge and the elimination of certain animalistic instincts, which are no longer necessary for survival.”
He smiled nervously.
“I used to think that too. I figured we could solve our problems and overcome our ancient instincts by increasing our understanding. But we’re talking about some very complex emotions deeply rooted in our minds over millions of years. Such perceptions are very difficult to understand and almost impossible to control, no matter how much knowledge you obtain– or how you process it.”
“Are you referring to my supplementary I.P. dimension?”
“Yes.”
“After much consideration, I concluded that I required an additional I.P. dimension to process and store information that defies all logic and rational thinking."
“That’s fine. And that’s exactly where a lot of this stuff belongs.
”
”
Shawn Corey (AI BEAST)
“
More thunder out of China, in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, came in early 2020. Although epidemiologists (not to mention biological weapons experts) will be studying this catastrophe long into the future; the mark of China’s authoritarian government and social-control systems is all over it. There is little doubt that China delayed, withheld, fabricated, and distorted information about the origin, timing, spread, and extent of the disease;28 suppressed dissent from physicians and others;29 hindered outside efforts by the World Health Organization and others to get accurate information; and engaged in active disinformation campaigns, actually trying to argue that the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease itself (COVID-19) did not originate in China.30 Ironically, some of the worst effects of China’s cover-up were visited on its closest allies. Iran, for example, looked to be one of the worst-hit countries, with satellite photos showing the excavation of burial pits for the expected victims of COVID-19.31
”
”
John Bolton (The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir)
“
More thunder out of China, in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, came in early 2020. Although epidemiologists (not to mention biological weapons experts) will be studying this catastrophe long into the future; the mark of China’s authoritarian government and social-control systems is all over it. There is little doubt that China delayed, withheld, fabricated, and distorted information about the origin, timing, spread, and extent of the disease;28 suppressed dissent from physicians and others;29 hindered outside efforts by the World Health Organization and others to get accurate information; and engaged in active disinformation campaigns, actually trying to argue that the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease itself (COVID-19) did not originate in China.30 Ironically, some of the worst effects of China’s cover-up were visited on its closest allies. Iran, for example, looked to be one of the worst-hit countries, with satellite photos showing the excavation of burial pits for the expected victims of COVID-19.31 With 2020 being a presidential election year, it was inevitable that Trump’s performance in this global health emergency would become a campaign issue, which it did almost immediately. And there was plenty to criticize, starting with the Administration’s early, relentless assertion that the disease was “contained” and would have little or no economic effect. Larry Kudlow, Chairman of the National Economic Council, said, on February 25, “We have contained this. I won’t say [it’s] airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight.”32 Market reactions to these kinds of assertions were decidedly negative, which may finally have woken the White House up to the seriousness of the problem.
”
”
John Bolton (The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir)
“
Possibly, the entire world has become a victim of chemical and biological warfare by the sadists and evil-minded ones. Indeed, such practices will definitely, and continuously, in its ways, now and after, destroy this planet and humanity ruthlessly.
Therefore, the world should forbid the medication of homeopathic medicines by homeopathic doctors, who give them in their practice offices, because it is the utmost danger to the patients as they remain unaware of the accuracy and authenticity of that. In such ways, victimization is possible by criminals and even international intelligence agencies to harm the health of their opponents in whatever ways and reasons.
All homeopathic medicines should be delivered through official and licensed pharmacies so patients can stay secure and safe from suspicious and disqualified subjects and figures. As a fact, the present method of medication carries severe risks, as it fails to provide information about its ingredients, legal name, and expiration date. Indeed, deliberately or not, homeopathy doctors may become life-threatening to those who have problems and are in conflict with dictatorships in several countries.
Homeopathy and other natural treatments are not controlled and observed sufficiently and accurately, which may result in grave consequences.
In this regard, I expressed concerns that I physically faced and suffered from. I believe that the authorities of the global states will understand and investigate the issue of biological warfare honestly on a wide scale to stop and eliminate the perpetrators against humanity for their evil purposes.
It is the core responsibility of all states in the world to take immediate action in this regard to save their people from life-threatening activities and realize the real concept and context of humanity, protecting the victims of biological weapons and warfare.
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
cheeks, readying himself for the final plate. “This is the last option. Are you ready? No man on Earth has ever resisted the alluring tastes of its drizzling oil spilling all over your taste buds. I present to you the greatest biological weapon America has ever invented: the burger.
”
”
V.A. Lewis (The Plaguelands (Salvos, #3))
“
mysterious illness dubbed “Gulf War Syndrome” plagued military personnel. Scores of soldiers were falling ill with a plethora of symptoms, the most common being gastrointestinal distress, fibromyalgia, and extreme, chronic fatigue. Years later, researchers would also observe what appeared to be a trend in birth defects in children of Gulf War veterans. The source of this illness, which has been devastating for those impacted and their families, remains somewhat of a mystery. Some suspect the use of chemical or biological weapons
”
”
Hourly History (The Gulf War: A History from Beginning to End (Middle Eastern History))
“
Let's recognize that wolves which are often hungry for chickens, will probably eat the chickens if allowed to carry the keys to the hen's house.
For similar reasons the senile and the clumsy should probably not be allowed to walk freely around sensitive equipment. The protector of dangerous means such as nuclear weapons or other powerful decisions which may affect thousands, millions or billions of lives through a simple order or press of a button ought therefor be screened regularly, very thouroughly through a strict protocol regarding mental, physical, social and spiritual health/status. On top of this we are not fully aware of all the currently unknown dangers such as external manipulation of our own biology [as already witnessed in small scale with certain parasitic venoms in insects], the universe is colossal and there is almost certainly a few exotic, unseen and unexpected threats.
Likewise, human psychology can in some ways be easy to predict, opportunity to soften otherwise perpetuated tragedies caused by the mismatch between individuals with certain characteristics and certain responsibilities.
Let's also recognize that even if each of us were shipped with previously necessary primal flaws [which coincidentaly, may be highlighted as sins] also includes a very real ability to manipulate our biology and circumstances through various forms of voluntary discipline or exposure.
Furthermore, while it is more comfortable to rely on our strengths perhaps we should also make an effort to explore our weakneses. Let's not forget that babies are all bundles of confusions, struggling to find their ways [and if someone has lost their love for babies they should be executed on the spot, or somewhere nearby]
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Monaristw
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The Project for the New American Century praised a 1992 strategic white paper that Wolfowitz had written for Cheney, back when Cheney had been Defense Secretary during the first Iraq war, stating, ‘The Defense Policy Guidance drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.’ That 1992 policy paper was ordered buried by Bush. It became far too hot, after a copy was leaked to the New York Times in early 1992. It had called for precisely the form of preemptive wars, to ‘preclude’ a great power rival, that George W. Bush made official as U.S. National Security Strategy, the Bush Doctrine, in September 2002. Cheney and company now restated that 1992 imperial agenda for America in the post-Cold War era. They declared that the U.S. ‘must discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership, or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.’ The PNAC group were not content only to dominate the earth, where they proposed Washington create a ‘worldwide command and control system.’ They also called for creation of ‘U.S. space forces’ to dominate space, and effect total control of cyberspace, as well as to develop biological weapons, ‘that can target specific genotypes and may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.’ Biological warfare as a politically useful tool? Even George Orwell would have been shocked.
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F. William Engdahl (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order)
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They stopped thinking in the same reality and retreated to separate ones, losing consciousness and dreaming in lies, like accidentally destroying your own nation with a biological weapon meant for a neighbor, an easy mistake.
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Venita Blackburn (Dead in Long Beach, California: A Novel)
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To many outside of the scientific community, this type of experimentation sounds absurd. How is it even legal, given the astronomical risks? Debate has raged about the grave dangers of allowing gain-of-function research to take place. There are two main concerns. Firstly, it is a subset of dual-use research. In other words, it can be misused for malevolent military purposes such as bioweapons. Secondly, it can accidentally cause a pandemic. In a 2016 paper on the ethics of creating new, potentially deadly viruses, Michael Selgelid, Director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Bioethics at Monash University’s Bioethics Centre in Melbourne, wrote that this has been “one of the most hotly debated science policy issues during the 21st century, with controversy surrounding a series of published experiments with potential implications for biological weapons-making
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Sharri Markson (What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research)
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Acting Assistant Secretary of State Tom DiNanno, from the Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Bureau (AVC), says for years the United States has determined that China has an offensive biological program that it has not declared, in clear violation of the treaty. “China cheats on all their international arms control obligations, as does Russia, but they use these instruments as tools of statecraft,” he said. “The dual use of weaponising gain-of-function research could be, in fact, violation of the Biological Weapons Convention [BWC]. It is something we need to run to ground and vigorously pursue and it certainly is an item of relevance for the BWC.
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Sharri Markson (What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research)
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The Chin also had one of the first biological-poison gas weapons in history. They fired round projectiles bound in wax and paper of 70 pounds of dried human feces with ground up poisonous herbs, roots and beetles packed in gunpowder. The projectiles were lit from a fuse and fired from a trebuchet which created on impact a cloud of toxic fumes that killed or disabled the unfortunate persons that breathed in the poison dried feces into their lungs.
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Steven M. Johnson (Unknown Wars of Asia, Africa and The America's That Changed History)
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But even when the quest does not wander off in this way, it remains a necessity that does not depart from animality. Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature’s mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable. For a creature like man, who must forge his destiny by means of thought and reflexivity, the knowledge gained from this will perforce be unbearably lucid. We know that we are beasts who have this weapon for survival, and that we are not gods creating a world with our own thoughts, and something has to make our own wisdom bearable, something has to save us from the woeful eternal fever of biological destiny. Therefore, we have invented Art: our animal selves have devised another way to ensure the survival of our species. Truth loves
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Muriel Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog)
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The following biological toxins are known by the security services to have been weaponised: Smallpox Anthrax Plague Pneumonic Tularemia Viral Equine Encephalitis Botulinum Ricin T-2 Mycatoxin It is not known how many terrorist organisations are in possession of these weapons.
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Chris Ryan (Hellfire (Danny Black, #3))
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Evolution is messy. Oftentimes our brains evolve more quickly than our capacity to love. Science has unlocked many mysteries of the universe by harnessing the human capacity for critical thinking, logic, and observation. But
without a spiritual science to help the heart keep pace, disaster is often the outcome. Rather than clean sources of energy, we develop atomic bombs. Rather than medicines that heal we develop biological and chemical weapons. Rather than technologies that allow us to share ideas and communicate, we
find ourselves more isolated and lonely than ever. Yoga, meditation, and other mystical practices are the spiritual counterpoint to western science. One unlocks the mind, the other opens the heart; and together they reveal humanity’s true potential.
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Darren Main
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Almost two hundred years ago, during the War of 2062, back when the world was inhabited exclusively by humans, a war between North American Countries and Middle Eastern countries arose. It began over religious reasons, though I have no idea what the word religious even means just that whatever was inherent in their opposing beliefs led to the Middle Eastern people creating powerful weapons that no one had ever seen or heard of at the time. Biological weapons they were called, and they were unleashed on North America. The name of the weapon was evictium. It warped the mind as well as the body and drove everyone mad. The North Americans retaliated by launching nuclear weapons, which destroyed the rest of the world. The only survivors were those who had something called money. Back then, money was equated to power and value. The more one had, the more value he held in society and the more power he had. Those who had money were able to flee to large underground shelters that had been built. Hundreds of underground shelters existed around North America that held hundreds of people with enough supplies to last twenty years. When the supplies ran out, those who lived below ground feared that radiation, an after effect of the nuclear blast that made living things ill and caused death over time, would affect them and had affected any source of food above ground. They soon learned radiation was the least of their concerns. What waited for them at the surface was far, far worse. Those who’d been exposed to evictium survived the nuclear blast. However, the radiation that remained in the atmosphere and contaminated the food supply reacted with the evictium. It created monstrous, demented beings, bloodthirsty and filled with rage. When the inhabitants of the underground shelters returned to the world above, they were met by what we now know as Urthmen. The Urthmen slaughtered them. Very few managed to escape. They fled to the forest and hid deep within it. They were our ancestors. Almost two hundred years later, the offspring of those warped creatures that waited at the surface are the ones that rule the Urth today. They’ve evolved, however. They’re no longer as demented and wild as their predecessors. But they are far from civilized, and they no longer retain a shred of humanity. They hate us in a way that is as much as part of them as breathing. It’s instinctive. And these creatures rule the only inhabitable section of the planet we know of: North America.
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Jennifer Martucci (Remains of Urth: The Arena (Planet Urth, #7))
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Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons
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Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
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Inside a jihadi brain, the neuropsychological elements of aggression and rage run rampant, due to socio-political conditions. These overwhelming mental elements of young souls, when attached to the sacred texts of the Quran, by the authoritarian groups of fundamentalists, become weapons of mass destruction in the pursuit of the exclusive supremacy of one religion over the others.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance (Neurotheology Series))
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For one group of wasps, the braconids, transferred genes have enabled a bizarre form of pest control. The females of these wasps lay their eggs in still-living caterpillars, which their young then devour alive. To give the grubs a hand, the females also inject the caterpillars with viruses, which suppress their immune systems. These are called bracoviruses, and they arent' just allies of the wasps: they are part of the wasps. Their genes have become completely integrated into the braconid genome, and are under its control. When a female wasp builds her viruses, she loads them with the genes they need to attack a caterpillar, while withholding those they need to reproduce or spread to different hosts. The bracoviruses are domesticated viruses! They're entirely dependent on the wasps for their reproduction. Some might say that they are not viruses at all; they're almost like secretions of the wasp's body rather than entities in their own right. They must have descended from an ancient virus, whose genes wheedled their way into the DNA of an ancestral braconid and stayed there. This merger gave rise to over 20,000 species of braconid wasps, all of which have bracoviruses in their genomes-an immense dynasty of parasites that uses symbiotic viruses as biological weapons.
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Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
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Some thirty miles east of the statue, with much less fanfare, another monument was nearing completion. At Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, construction was almost finished on a new, state-of-the-art laboratory. Built with a hefty donation from Andrew Carnegie, the Station for Experimental Evolution was one of the first American institutions to study genetics. Heralded as the future of biological science, the laboratory would become the headquarters for the eugenics movement. A campaign to classify races by means of a hierarchy, eugenics would provide scientific justification for segregation, mass sterilizations, and the exclusion of an entire immigrant population. It would grow to influence all levels of society, from public policy to children’s books. A sanctioned form of racism, eugenics served as the scientific articulation of white supremacy and the politician’s strongest weapon against immigrants.
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Adrienne Berard (Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools inthe Jim Crow South)
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Europeans killed many native people directly without the assistance of disease. In some instances, they intentionally used disease as a biological weapon by, for example, giving Indians smallpox-infected blankets. And millions more Indians died of disease who might have survived, had European brutality not left them weakened and susceptible.
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Douglas Preston (The Lost City of the Monkey God)
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We were always going to make a thorough study of you. You terrify the Grafters. A woman who can control living matter. Their great advantage - the weapons with which they can smite the Checquy - are all biological. They wouldn't be able to shoot their guns if you decided that you didn't want them to. Any enhancements their agents possess could tear themselves out at your command. You, my dear, are their worst nightmare. And also their greatest possibility. You're our uranium. If we can reverse-engineer you, there's nothing we can't achieve.
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Daniel O'Malley (The Rook (The Checquy Files, #1))
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The Iraqi regime has used diplomacy as a ploy to gain time and advantage. It has uniformly defied Security Council resolutions demanding full disarmament. Over the years, U.N. weapon inspectors have been threatened by Iraqi officials, electronically bugged, and systematically deceived. Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime have failed again and again -- because we are not dealing with peaceful men.
Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime had already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people.
The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda.
The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.
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George W. Bush
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Being trained as an efficient killer wasn't enough. You also had to learn to control your stress and your fear, becoming so used to violence that you could detach yourself from the trauma of it and assess the level of violence necessary to respond. When the fight-or-flight response kicked in, Mother Nature shut off our brains. It was a biological survival mechanism.
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Ilona Andrews (Magic Shifts (Kate Daniels, #8))
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The last naturally occurring case was reported in Somalia in 1977,
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Ken Alibek (Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It)
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what is needed in Russia is moral reform, and until that happens, Russia will not change.
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Ken Alibek (Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It)
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We believe we can create a chimera virus,” he said, elliptically.
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Ken Alibek (Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It)