Every once in a while I get an e-mail that makes me say to myself, "What the hell...!?" The other day I received one entitled, "Attention!! This is a MUST read!

Normally, I just delete crap like this, but I figure that I have a moral obligation to respond to things called "Must Read" or "What Every American Must Know" if only to keep insanity from being unanimous.

This garbage is all about the dire predictions of one Juval Aviv, allegedly Golda Meir's bodyguard and the inspiration for "Munich" and "Sword of Gideon," who, as the result of his Israeli experiences, runs a company that talks about terrorism to people who are interested in hearing about that. You can make an awful lot of money doing that nowadays, 'cause there's a huge ready audience of abject cowards who spend all the livelong day thinking about, talking about, worrying about, reading about, and watching TV articles about terrorists. These people are so paranoid that they panic at the sight of Air Force One, escorted by fighters, no less, flying over New York. (I don't make this stuff up, folks. Click here!)

Being the cynical guy that I am, I suspect that Mr. Aviv started this e-mail circulating as advertisement for his book, "Staying Safe: The Complete Guide to Protecting Yourself, Your Family, and Your Business." I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that this book will be at least moderately successful, balancing the "nervous Nellys'" thirst for helpful hints about how to stay safe against modern America's chronic aversion to anything as old-fashioned and intellectual as reading a book.

Now, I can sympathize with Mr. Aviv. He's almost certainly a Jew, and people have been hating Jews for all of recorded history. He comes from a small country surrounded by enemies. He got lucky with the Bill O'Reilly show prediction, but his other predictions are only reasonably educated guesses. "The next terrorist attack here in America is imminent" means it will happen sometime. "Suicide bombers and non-suicide bombers" includes just about everybody, and "places where large groups of people congregate" includes virtually everywhere that is not a farm. To be safe, Mr. Aviv includes "rural America (farms) this time." Is there anybody who doesn't think that some time in the future someone is going to commit a terrorist act somewhere in the US? Come on!

Armed with the gift of prophecy at least as reliable as Mr. Aviv's, I confidently predict that terrorists will not simultaneously detonate anything in 5-8 cities in the US, they will continue to use suicide bombers elsewhere, and that the reason "our U. S. Government isn't doing anything about it" is because it's unconstitutional to prevent stuff from happening by interfering in the peaceful pursuits of innocent citizens - thank God! We learned our lesson from rounding up "Japs" after Pearl Harbor. They do things differently in Israel because they don't have a Constitution like ours. If you think Israel is better, move there, and good riddance! Nobody's making you stay here.

Terrorists at worst threaten the lives of a few hundred individuals a year, while global warming threatens the future of the entire human race. It's "irrelevant" only if you happen to be an amoeba.

The reason that the US is reactive instead of proactive is because almost nobody knows how stop terrorists from doing things, but everybody can see that something is being done, even if it's the wrong thing, when they have to participate. If some smart person says "the way to foil terrorists is to ignore them," people will think he's a crackpot, because that involves doing nothing, and modern Americans don't like doing nothing even if it's the right thing to do. But if some important person makes a rule that everyone should take off his shoes to keep terrorists from blowing up airplanes, people will go along with him because one bozo actually tried that but now he can't, so taking off your shoes must be doing some good. The fact that nobody has ever actually blown up an airplane because he wasn't made to take off his shoes doesn't seem to matter.

I'm OK with having a dog that can sniff out explosives sitting next to where the people walk to get on the airplane. That way it can detect them in socks, underwear, wigs and prosthetic appliances, too. I admit that I don't know what to do about explosive breast implants. Feel free to let me know if you have any ideas.

Mr. Aviv is mistaken about students who frequently travel to the Middle East. By the time they "know our language and ... fully understand the habits of Americans," they often want to become Americans themselves. Besides, they're easier for "good Christians" to hate when they live here and you can supposedly recognize them on the streets.

"We need to instead follow Israel's, Ireland's and England's hands-on examples of human intelligence." Yeah, right! Like we'd be better off with the terrorist problems they have in those countries! Where I live, we have not yet become so nervous that we're terrified of an unattended bag, and we know that children whose parents are prevented from picking them up after school, for any reason, are probably not going to be sold to slavers! The school knows where they live, to whom they belong, and what their telephone number is, and American schools don't turn the kids out in the cold to fend for themselves if the parents don't pick them up on time.

I, for one, am not going to be terribly offended if "the government: temporarily cuts off "everyone's ability to use cell phones, blackberries, etc." I find the damned things annoying and incredibly rude! If you want reliable communication, use the hard-wired Internet. Nobody can turn that off!

As a certified safety professional and professional safety engineer, I think I know a thing or two about "Staying Safe." First of all, it can't be done. Safety costs money, and you can be only as safe as you pay for. If we spend money on the appearance of safety instead of things that make us really safe, we'll get apparent safety, like we have now, instead of real safety. I assure you, people, there is no such thing as a "Complete Guide to Protecting Yourself, Your Family, and Your Business," and anyone who tells you differently is either crazy, stupid, a liar, or a combination thereof!

Consider: The 9/11 attacks killed about 3000 people in 2001 and only a handful since then. Every year since then, about 435,000 Americans died from smoking, 400,000 from malnutrition, 197,000 from pneumonia and influenza, 85,000 from alcohol abuse, 75,000 from bacterial infections, 55,000 from poisoning, 43,000 from motor vehicle accidents, 29,000 from gunshot wounds, 20,000 from risky sexual behaviors, and 17,000 from direct results of drug abuse. Do we have TSA people checking people for genital warts? Ha!

The fact is, terrorists aren't even a nuisance, except for the news reports about them. A certified professional (me) can show statistically that the number of terrorist victims since 9/11/01 is only 3/100 of one percent of deaths from hazards we accept every day; nobody's going to care. Osama bin Laden can make a videotape composed entirely of lunatic jihadist crap and the public will go nuts over the free prime time coverage he'll get on every TV station in the country!

I say continue effective law enforcement, but otherwise ignore the sons of bitches! Your chances of being killed by a terrorist are about the same as being killed by an avalanche. Quick - look outside! Is a mountain about to fall on you? Well, there aren't any terrorists out there, either.

You want to be safe? Do what I do. I stopped smoking, eat right, get my flu shots, avoid alcohol, wash my hands, stay away from poisonous substances, drive defensively, use firearms responsibly, use drugs the way they're prescribed for me, and have sex with only healthy people I'm married to. How about you?

On the other hand, I'm an American, and I like it here just fine. I'm not afraid of anybody, certainly not a bunch of ignorant, unwashed, goat-roping, rag-headed fanatic Darwin award contenders. Self-killing lunatic soldiers! What a concept! I wish we'd had those in Vietnam! We're all going to die someday, just like Golda Meir. I prefer to do that once, not a thousand times.

Antarctica hasn't ever had a terrorist attack. If you're worried about terrorists, move there! Where I live used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave; I intend to keep on being both!

John Lindorfer