[John H K]

Me either, and I got tired of constantly posting and reposting the same darned information over and over to disprove those wacko theories. Some people just WANT the sky to fall.

It's actually that people find it more comforting that disease outbreaks be bioterror instead of nature acting more or less randomly, believe it or not.

The idea that we're going to see deadly diseases randomly spring up and accidentally get transported to this country is more frightening than the idea that someone would deliberately engineer and deliver a disease; the former seems more "controllable" and you can solve the problem and make everything right by just finding or punishing the bad guys.

[Nick Danger]

It's actually that people find it more comforting that disease outbreaks be bioterror instead of nature acting more or less randomly, believe it or not.

I have long had a pet theory that some of this is caused by grammar, which constricts the way some people can think. In English, we have to have an "it" that rains. "It" is raining. There's always an "it" or a "they" behind everything that happens. The structure of the language requires that it be so.

The world, on the other hand, does not give a damn about grammar. Or if it does, its favorite pronoun is "sh*t", as in "Sh*t happens." In some languages, this is not a problem. The Japanese ame ga furimasu ("It is raining") is more literally something like "As for rain, falling is true." There's no "it" behind the scenes making the rain happen. It just "happens." So in Japan, the big national fear revolves around horrible things just "happening." Fanciful monsters, giant earthquakes, that sort of thing. Their culture is full of that stuff, where ours is full of SMERSH and Bilderburgers and Illuminatis, shadowy powers so omnipotent they can practically make rain fall.