Pandemic Potential in Mid East Bio Warfare

The invaluable DebkaFiles looks at the truly grusome and remarkably perverse potential outcomes of bio-warfare in the Middle East. The critical factor is that the Palestinians live cheek by jowl with the Israelis. Hit Israel with biologicals and you will also infect swaths of Palestinian territory.

But the effects are likely to be startlingly asymetrical. Israel has a first world medical care system. It has been preparing for the possibility of bio-war since the last time Iraq was belligerent. It has a plan and the capacity to execute it.

The Palestinian Authority, a joke government foisted on a long suffering people, has no plan, few doctors, next to no supplies and a dense population. Smallpox or any of the other little horrors Saddam is waving about would decimate - no, worse than that, eradicate large sections of the poor Palestinians.

And the terror would not stop there: Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi are all vunerable. So are we in the West unless, at the very first sign of biologicals we shut our borders tight - which would be very difficult to do.

The quicker Saddam goes the safer we will all be.

Human clone born: Raelians - theage.com.au

Look...I'm telling you it's a clone. How can I tell? Well it looks just like Winston Churchill. No really, it is a clone...I promise on my Raelian honour...May I drink the Kool Aid if I tell a lie.

Prada: The Science Of Desire

"When you're selling a $500 scarf, the scarf is the last thing you sell. First, you persuade the customer your products are worth that kind of price. After that, you never let the customer go."

I often wonder where the Pradas of the world find these customers for $500 concepts scarves or $350 "statement sneakers".

I cannot imagine it. Which is probably why I do not have a great deal of money: my desires are too easily met. Silly me.

Christmas Story

So I manage to complete the family Christmas shopping in two and a half hours on Christmas Eve and a I am dashing for the Dunbar bus. Missed it and the driver would not stop outside the bus zone. Damn.

"Hey, want a ride up the hill?" I looked around.

There were a couple in their late forties who had seen me make my doomed run. "He should have stopped for you."

In I hopped. Christmas lives.

Computer Hell...Well, heck anyway

Five days ago I was typing away getting ready to finish a piece before Christmas and call it a week. Blip. Black screen. The night before the night befoe Christmas and not an unallocated dime in the house.

My friend and co-author Robert was kind enough to give me a computer surplus to his needs...a mensch is our Robert. But it is a Pentium 200. Perfectly nice computer but slow, very, very, slow. I tweaked it out as far as I could and was about to begin to start playing with the jumpers to overclock the Pentium chip to a blinding 250 Mhz. But then, an epiphany: if I could get the old faithful Celeron back up and running I could overclock it. Afterall, it was simply scrap silicone lying in my tiny office.

I bought a new case and power supply, isolated a few problems and boom it came up. So I overclocked the sucker stable at 456 Mhz....now I know you can buy a Pentium 4 at 2.5 Ghz for some tiny sum. But it is blinding when you have been working at 366. So far she is stable. I slapped a heat sink on the video card (saved from my old P90) and it seems to be holding the PCI video card steady.

So it is all good. Robert is a God.