So. Anthrax in Florida. Huh. Rumors elsewhere leading to frenzied investigations of everything that even remotely resembles something that could possibly be suspicious.

So far I've managed to avoid being too terribly paranoid about that tickle in the back of my throat; it's fall, after all, and one can't freak out over every little thing. And we are still very early in this affair. At least it's not smallpox, right?

Speaking of smallpox, I read in an article on bioterrorism today that the Soviets had facilities for creating something like one hundred tons of smallpox virus. What the hell was the point of that? You don't need one hundred tons of something that virulent, a gram should do the job nicely (a vaccine, on the other hand, you'd need lots of unless you're into slaughtering your own). No wonder the whole bloody thing collapsed if that was what they were spending their money on.

Back to anthrax—the part that gets me is that so far it's looking like this business wasn't connected to anything else going on; to judge from the news lately, it seems that every nut-job in the country has taken 9/11 as license to finally act out whatever demented dramas have been playing on the inside of their heads for who knows how many years. Some guy tries to take out a Greyhound bus, idiots call in bomb threats to every conceivable locale, another guy sprays something in the air on the D.C. Metro and gets in a predictable scuffle with the police.... Humanity still hasn't ceased to amaze me.

The latest threat from al-Qaeda kindly lets us know that "The storm of the planes will not stop." Hard not to read that as an admission of responsibility, which may serve to set some peoples' minds more at ease over the targeting of bin Laden and Afghanistan. I wonder, do they really think they're going to win this? I can see two outcomes for this war: they lose, or everyone loses.

They also felt a need to remind us that their lot look forward to dying. To which my response of late tends to be, "In that case I think our sides can make each other happy."

| Top |