Big front-page banner headline story in today's Oregonian about a group of 40 or so clowns who bike recklessly and at high speed from the Oregon Zoo down to downtown every Sunday night. Forty miles an hour downhill on city streets, in the dark, with no helmets.

How interesting. And now that it's been glamorized so prominently, there will be 80 dopies up there instead of 40, quadrupling the odds of somebody getting killed.

The New York Times is in the same league. Big front page story yesterday about how scientists have now developed a super-lethal form of mousepox, and how they could probably do the same with human smallpox.

The message? It's only a matter of time before the terrorists get their hands on vaccine-resistant human smallpox and wipe us all out.

Again, interesting, even terrifying. But what's the sense of running a front-page story on this?

Thanks to big science for showing us how bioterrorism can be done.

And thanks to The Times for giving every outraged extremist the idea that he or she can do it.

What next? How about "news stories" like "You could drive the wrong way down the freeway"? Or "You could buy a machine gun and take out your co-workers"?