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To: harley@argote.ch (Robert Harley), fork@spamassassin.taint.org
From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>
Subject: Re: Al'Qaeda's fantasy ideology: Policy Review no. 114
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Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2002 19:27:23 -0400

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At 11:12 PM +0200 on 8/18/02, Robert Harley wrote:


> PS: Funny how the New World world population supposedly had no
> immunity
>     to Old World diseases and died like flies, but the Old World
>     population was completely unaffected by New World diseases
> (other
>     than tabacco and syphilis...)  Bullshit meter red-lining
> again...

See Jared Diamond's excellent "Guns, Germs, and Steel" for the story.

Eurasians had outrageously huge, dense, populations to incubate and
immunize whole classes of fatal diseases in, and unobstructed
east-west trans-supercontinental disease transport vectors (horses,
the silk road, sailing ships) to spread them around with.

Game over, man. Same thing with war, technology, crops, domestic
animals and everything else worth having in life. :-).

Remember Joel Mokyr's definition of progress from "The Lever of
Riches": Progress is more stuff cheaper.

Cheers,
RAH

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-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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