Well, to be fair to Wired, they were just pointing out an article that was currently being featured in the London Sunday Times. Which is what they do: point out news-y things that are currently being featured in other media. IOW, they weren’t reporting, “Hey, the Israelis are making an ethno-bomb!”, they were saying, “Hey, the London Sunday Times says that these ‘undisclosed sources’ say that the Israelis are making an ethno-bomb at their sooper-seekrit laBORatree.”
Maybe they should have had a big “Uh huh” rolleyes in there somewhere…
Also, I went back to see what else was going on in November 1998, that would lead Wired to feature such an obvious smear/UL: November 16, 1998 was the day that Netanyahu abruptly announced the suspension of troop withdrawals from the West Bank. So that made it more timely than if they had featured it during a more optimistic Mideast time period.
You still have the problem of how to get them to eat it. I’m pretty sure neither Jews nor Muslims eat bugs. Shoot, as a Christian without dietary restrictions, I wouldn’t eat a bug. Bugs weren’t on ASTRO’s list.
I bet Allison Hannigan wouldn’t eat a bug either. Unless it’s for her “craft,” y’know, some Lifetime movie where she plays the girl who’s mother is sleeping with her boyfriend, the same boyfriend who beats her, so she runs away and gets lost in the woods, where she has to survive on just her wits with nothing more than a tube of lip gloss and an eyelash curler, and so she has to eat bugs.
Even then I doubt it would be a real bug. Probably a chocolate stunt bug.
According to my somewhat vague memories, it targeted people according to their DNA and/or body chemistry and/or body structure and killed them; meant as a eugenics weapon to kill off “inferiors”. I remember some scientist making a comment about how you could use it to kill everyone who was, say, too short or too tall or according to their percentage of body fat.
What would worry me is that any nation is thinking about it, and other nations weren’t.
If it were even possible to do such a thing, I’d want the US on the forefront. Because if it’s even remotely feasable, some other country is going to be working on it.
Before you go off on the Iran nuke issue, keep in mind the US hasn’t just gone willy-nilly with the warheads. 2 have been used. 60+ years ago. And we did a seemingly good job at building that country up beyond expectations.
Thank you! I have my wingman!
And yes, I meet the physical. Well, at least in that area. I’m sure Allison isn’t into pasty-white, married, fat white goys.
(If I am mistaken about this, will someone forward this thread to her. Thanks.)
The reason that you are receiving so much abuse on this point is that a knowledge that such an act would be impossible means that most likely the story was so much nonsense, to begin with.
It would be like periodic stories that pop up claiming that the U.S. is studying ways to harm black citizens or Russians or something. It simply makes no sense.
If there was a way to target one of two very closely related groups (that we already know are very diverse inside the groups), how would such a weapon be controlled to prevent killing Arab Israelis (and there are many) or visiting dignitaries from other countries? Such an (already impossible) weapon would cause far more problems than it would solve, meaning the very claim for the story is probably a lie.
(We also do not know what the original Times story said. Was it a claim by a serious reporter that thought there really was such a program? Was it an Op-Ed piece by someone with a grudge against Israel? Was it a planted story in which the Times simply repeated a rumor off an Arab wire service?)
All in all, most posters recognized the original story as nonsense and reacted against you having taken it seriously.
You should have paid more attention to the SDMB “race” wars of 2001 - 2003.
The differences we see in appearances among groups are due to different expressions of the alleles of the same genes, not to separate genes. When Noah Rosenberg et al. set out to identify genetic populations (as reported in Science, in December, 2002), they were, indeed, able to identify the geographic origin of most people, but that was based on a statistical analysis of clusters of genetic markers. No single group was found who all shared the actual genetic markers, rather clusters of different markers showed up in statistical analysis of the various groups. In fact, in the Middle East, where population migrations have ranged back and forth across the region from Africa to Asia to Europe and back again, the number of individual markers needed for statistical analysis to identify general groups was the greatest required in the entire world survey. Picking out a “group” from the Middle East, genetically, would be an exerecise in utter futility.
Given the religious conservatism espoused by a preponderance of Israel’s enemies, I’d suggest that rather than producing complicated, and doubtless extremely expensive, genetic-polymorphism-specific biological agents, they should instead follow our lead and develop TEH GHEY BOMB!!1!!!1!!11!!!1!!
