Res Ipsa Loquitur

Well worth the time, thanks.
I've had a lot of the same worries myself.
It's one thing for a politician not to comprehend the risk, but the fact that nearly 50% of the public is in the same state of insouciance disturbs me.

Rita, thanks for the link. Someday, when we don’t need them, we’ll beat our swords into plowshares. I long for that day, but I’m glad I don’t have to wait alone. Ciao!

Rita, THANK YOU for pointing me to that article & blog -- he's going onto my list of Daily Must Reads.

Impressive, and the very act of presenting it for response is part of the reason that human beings will defeat the monsters. The other night while getting ready for work I watched the National Geographic documentary (hosted by Matt Lauer) about the Richard Reid/Shoe Bomber incident in December of 2001. I felt myself becoming more and more emotional as the crew and passengers talked about how they had felt and responded during the flight, and in the climax, as they described how they had faced the enemy and won, I wanted to cheer. At the end of the show, a terrorism expert was on hand to explain everything, and while he was describing Richard Reid as clever, cunning, and sophisticated, I suddenly understood that no, Richard Reid wasn't any of those things (and neither was the analyst). He was an alien enemy who attacked humans and was defeated. John Steinbeck has a paragraph in East of Eden describing Mrs. Trask, and paraphrasing, says that just as there are humans born with misplaced, nonfunctioning, or missing limbs, there are humans born without the capacity to ever integrate into the group (become a human being). The more clever of them can fake whatever it is they lack, but it's only a gesture, and the rest of us generally know when they are present, at some level. Every person who had contact with Reid, from the initial security officers who were suspicious enough to call the French police, who then questioned Reid for so long that he missed that day's flight, to the flight crew and other passengers when he boarded the same flight the next day, singled him out for attention. Why? Because he isn't like the rest of us. He dressed somewhat like a human, he articulated his limbs similar to humans, and he could make the same noises, but they all saw the dangerous alien inside the human skin.