Fly Flu Flown

Bird flu is on its way. The Observer writes today: British GPs told: prepare for 14 million flu victims. First England... then us.
I don't want to get too worked upabout this, though. I'm not one to let fear control me too much, but we are at a terror alert level of "elevated" so we might as well freak out a little bit.
There are some things about bird flu that don't worry me. One is that it has killed a relatively small number of people thus far (60) and even the WHO backed off of its original death estimate.
For a nice scary look at the subject that's really well written, check out this article from Harper's. It was the cover story back in October, 2004: We Are Not Immune.
Personally, I don't feel worried about Bird Flu. I don't work at a chicken farm, so am in a much smaller risk-group than someone who works at Perdue. I probably should be scared of a flu pandemic though, given that the one back in 1918 affected a lot of people in my age group, largely sparing younger kids and people over the age of 60.
All of thi HN51 stuff and the idea that human-to-human transfer of the virus may have already happened definitely raises concerns about our own government's ability to cope with something this big... I wonder if the private insurance industry could handle it, since the federal government would no doubt punt the issue to them... We shall see...

And now for something completely different.
I'd never heard of Operation Northwoods until this morning as I was reading through comments from the Condi link below, but after reading this Wikipedia entry, I'm a little less skeptical about one of my favorite consipracy theories.
And... Condi is an idiot, essentially saying on Meet the Press this morning that by invading Iraq, we were going after the root of the problem that caused 9/11. That's a lie. Iraq and terroism were... what's the word I want here... unrelated. Just because two groups are evil, doesn't mean they're evil in the same way. Saddam may have supported the idea of Americans dying, but he was evil for killing the people in his own country, not terrorizing us or even funding Al-Qaeda. I really hope Russert called her out on this statement. The end.

Time to go help waterproof the deck.