Taking a few minutes off from being one of the cleverest smartasses on the web, Master Ninja tells us a little about the concepts of “terrorism” and “war.”

Oh, did you notice how I didn’t use the word “terrorist attack” in that sentence there? Well, I did that on purpose. See, unless you have jelly for brains, you can realize that any military operation is a terrorist operation. When you’re in a war, you generally have two ways to get your point across – either you kill every one of your enemies (which occurs rarely) or you scare the living F— out of them until they surrender. Do you think the bombs we drop strategically ring our enemies’ doorbells and hide in the bushes? Do you think they have special “bad people” detectors? Do you think we have bombs that cast off the shackles of the oppressed while making their dictators think really hard about what they did wrong?

No. We – that is, America – drop bombs on people to scare the living f— out of them. We know we’re not going to eliminate all of our enemies. We also know that killing one, or three, or four hundred of the “key leaders” isn’t going to tear down the organization based on an ideal of hatred shared by many of their countrymen. What will stop any enemy is making them think, “Wait! They’ve got f—ing bombs! Big ones! I’m scared because one of those bombs might very well make me die.” Fear. Fear is a much greater weapon of war than any weapon that has ever been developed in any lab – unless they’re developing Fear Bombs, which very well might work better than Fear itself.

Better yet, go read the whole piece. Take note that it hasn’t been gently sanitized like the quoted paragraphs above. It’s damned good reading anyway.
Master Ninja – Terrorism

With enough time, practice and effort I hope to be as clever a writer as Emily, who has this to say about defending your right not to have a God:

But what bothers me is that my total lack of religion is perceived as a blank space to be filled with some god or another. Au contraire, my not-religion is just as firm in my mind as religion is to those who follow it. I’m not so much an atheist/agnostic as someone who has no doctrine about the theological and devotes herself instead to the here and now (is that what secular humanists do? I forget). The trouble is in defending this way of life to people who wish to convert me. They see it as a lack of something necessary, while I see it as a lack of something unnecessary.

I’m going to carry that last sentence with me for the rest of my days. Thanks, Emily!
“mormons”