Its interesting that Americans were suddenly thrust into a new world of terrorism on Sept. 11, 2001. The truth is the world had been like that for a long, long time, people just raised their heads and noticed it for a few minutes. World War I was started by anarchist terrorists. In 1919 a series of mail bombs in Gimbles Department store packages exploded around the country. Including bombs targeting senators and supreme court justices. Europe has been dealing with terrorist attacks nearly continuously since then, including attacks from the PLO, Red Brigade and IRA. American embassies and marine barracks were bombed. But on September, 11 the world changed. Of course it didn't we just noticed it, but only for a few minutes. By now its mostly forgotten.

At the same time, I'm not particularly afraid of terrorists. On Sept. 11 millions of people were working in office buildings around the country and approximately 3000 were killed. Millions of people flew in commercial aircraft and a few hundred were killed. It was a tremendous tragedy for those people and there families. But we need to keep the threat in proportion and not let fear run away with rational thought. I still fly commercial (although I am getting annoyed by the ramped up pettiness of security) and I'll still visit New York, Chicago and San Francisco when I get a chance. The threat just isn't big enough to warrant hiding out in the sticks.

What scares me is that all our current crop of politicians are just stuffed shirts without any solid leadership or ideas. But that's far too political for this board. What we can talk about though is threat assessments and what is and isn't worth worrying about. Right now nuclear weapons don't really make the list.