Pondering

Two things that occurred to me recently:

The trend of increasing government surveillance and control over its own populations- unmanned aerial drones are currently in use in the US, for example- for reasons 'homeland security' plus rather hysterical levels of terrorism related security. The TSA, for example, has continuously failed to stop 7 out of 10 weapons brought through screenings in testings, and the risk of getting cancer from the backscatter scanners is the same as dying in a terrorist attack.

We have only begun to study the impact of antibiotics use in people, and the completely unregulated use of antibiotics in livestock. Throw in the fact that antibiotics are widely available without perscription outside the US, and there is little surprise that we have seen the development and rise of common diseases which are increasingly resistant to antibiotics. There are now strains of diseases which have no effective antibiotic. What this means is that even though medical science can now replace your heart with a pump and regrow your liver, you could be killed by something that doctors in the 1950's could treat in a week with penicillin.

So if global pandemics of multidrug resistant disease breakout, all the infrastructure which was quietly built up to combat 'terrorism' and control populations will instantly flip around and be used for contagion control.