Smallpox

a) The safety of vaccines against viruses.
All tend to have a small risk of serious complications. Usually of the order 1 in 10,000. But almost all viruses (even ones not usually thought serious) present about the same order risk of serious consequences. It's simply a matter of weighing the risks. If the danger is greater form the disease, vaccinate, otherwise don't.

THAT'S why they stopped vaccinating against smallpox. The disease became so rare even the unlikely complications outweighed the risk from the disease (since nobody was catching it). Should smallpox reappear, that equation would change rapidly.

BTW -- smallpox would be a foolish "weapon". The result of its use this way would almost certainly be a worldwide pandemic. Your own people would die off too. I rather suspect that any pre-emptive vaccination campaign would arouse suspicion.

b) Humans did NOT "produce eveything". We did NOT create this planet, evolve its species, sculpt its landforms, etc. Hey, "the gods" don't like hubris so cut that out!

c) Finite vrs. infinite -- I think you don't know what infinite means. On this planet, there most definitely are just finite amounts of the elements -- maybe very large amounts of some of them but still finite. Geometric growth is not finite. Any limitation on size implies no longer growing! All finite quantities are less than any infinite one.

d) Brains? Maybe THAT'S the problem. We've got brains but haven't figured out how to use them to best advantage. We don't need MORE brains,we need better functioning ones.

e) It's not a matter of "wanting to get rid of useless eaters". That's a total misunderstanding. Look, there are people who accept that world is finite and that once the fossile resources produced over the last half billion years are exhausted the human population WILL end up a whole lot less. The only question is HOW we get to that lower but long term viable population. Do we figure out how to get our (still growing) population under control and gradually reduced gracefully (hopefully while some fossile resources are still left to "finance" this) or do we end up "crashing".

Now dig: your precious Alex Jones is simply a professional fearmonger. He makes a business out of frightening gullible people with outrageous, unsupported assertions.

In other words, dingbat, it's his damn living, so he has a very powerful motivation to say whatever he thinks will appeal to your tiny, terrified excuse for a mind, whether or not there's any truth to it. He certainly has no reason to honestly check any of his notions.

As for duration of smallpox immunity: whence came the data to support the claim that a person vaccinated decades ago is still immune? What experiments has he done to test this hypothesis?

The world of real science has not been claiming either that immunity lasts a lifetime or that it does not, instead admitting honestly that we have no reliable data to draw either conclusion.

We basically have these facts: We don't know for certain whether those of us who are old enough to have received routine smallpox immunization are still immune. We do know that there's a substantial population who were never vaccinated, since they were born after routine immunization ended, along with the existence of wild smallpox virus.

If we boomers are still immune, whether we make up a great enough proportion of the population to prevent re-introduced smallpox from spreading epidemically is a conjecture. While a rampaging disease might be just the ticket for some of the clueless twentysomethings with SUVs I encounter, I don't think I'd like to bet the future of humanity in this hemisphere on my 1957-vintage vaccination.

If the reintroduction of smallpox into the wild is a real possibility, we have two choices: to try as best we can to preapare to reintroduce immunization in response, or to let ourselves be paralyzed by fantastic fears spread by irresponsible cranks and volunteer to be sitting targets.

Now kindly go back to scanning the skies for black helicopters and stop wasting Web space on your breathless fantasies.