I daresay we prepare an awful lot for contingent possible bad things. But its the spectrum of possible outcomes that overwhelms the ability to choose which one or ones will be the likely pestilence.

I’m a bit troubled by the narrative though, if I may fisk, a bit:

The article appears to start with “The spores arrived from Kenya on dried, infected leaves ensconced in layers of envelopes.”

But we jump (or work) backwards to: “Working inside a bio-secure greenhouse outfitted with motion detectors and surveillance cameras, government scientists at the Cereal Disease Laboratory in St. Paul, Minn., suspended the fungal spores in a light mineral oil and sprayed them onto thousands of healthy wheat plants. After two weeks, the stalks were covered with deadly reddish blisters characteristic of the scourge known as Ug99. …

Umm, uh… “suspended the fungal spores in a light mineral oil and sprayed them onto thousands of healthy wheat plants” (?!)

Yeah, I can see the logic in that. /sarcasm off

“suspended the fungal spores in a light mineral oil and sprayed them onto thousands of healthy wheat plants???

I’m not a scientist, nor do I pretend to be one in non-debate-able senate hearings, nor on tv, but I could have told them that if you were the pluperfect fool and you sprayed fungal spores “onto thousands of healthy wheat plants”, it would probably lead to a veritable wheat fungal holocaust of exquisitely biblical proportion if you’d just had the simple horse sense to just ask me. Or someone with even the just-woke-up level of common sense to not do anything stupid just yet, and maybe take a maybe-we-just-better-re-think-this-one attitude to what the human mind can deduce from the bleeding obvious!!!

(Even if I hadn’t known beforehand the specific morphology that the above combination would produce “stalks [that] were covered with deadly reddish blisters characteristic of the scourge known as Ug99. …”)

Yeah right, and not to mention the cold comfort I get from the intricate use of motion detectors and surveillance cameras lest some non-group denke individual, without the proper stamped paperwork might “seize the intitiative” and commit an act whose objective might be to devise a way to eliminate or exterminate 90% of the worlds population, for our own good, and all without the expressed written consent of the “government scientists at the Cereal Disease Laboratory in St. Paul, Minn.,”

Jeeze, Is the purpose of the “Cereal Disease Laboratory in St. Paul, Minn” to help down-on-their-luck fungi get back in the game, or what?

And who was the genius who sent “spores on dried, infected leaves ensconced in layers of envelopes” all the way to Kenya from that bastion of disease isolation in St.Paul Minnesota? (scuze me if I decline to shake his hand)

The article is rather short on details of that chain of command, uh, events, not to mention the tremendous ethical considerations that weighed so heavily in the preliminary, pre-emptive deliberations

And of course I’m certainly comforted in the extreme by the extra-ordinary measures taken beforehand, such as isolating the fungal spores from the rest of the known universe by the cosmically brilliant method of “working inside a bio-secure greenhouse” only to liberate the virulent pestilence in some apparently self righteous act of courageous imprudence, based, one might presume, if not on the Uni-bomber Principle, then perhaps on a simpler plan to provide the fungus with a newfound ability to circumnavigate the globe [/sarcasm back on again], just to see, you know, what it might mean, you know, for the rest of humanity, you know, “biodiversity” and all.

Good Gaudy Almighty, it sounds like the source of countless threats threads here at the club based on another virulent strain, aided and abetted by some gummiyt idiots(s) yearning to make victims group of another voting block sure to come through in the next future elections…