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So there I was, not naked in the sauna. I hardly ever use it. I work for my sweat. But it was a Sunday mid-afternoon, and I’d had a nice run, and I’d been working on my one-armed chin-up (oooh!), and I’d soaked in the Jacuzzi, and I figured why not. Doing the sport that I do, I can lose up to 10 pounds in a few hours. Just water of course, but it comes from blood volume so I most certainly do replace the fluid, and I most certainly do not need to sit in a cedar-lined box just to sweat. I sweat enough. But it was a lazy Sunday mid-afternoon, and that’s what I was doing.

Some fellow I have a nodding acquaintance was there, and we chatted a bit, and it came around to the War, and how Bush was blowing it. That was his take. My take was that wars are messy, and don’t go according to plan, and that Roosevelt had a plan that didn’t work, and Churchill did, and the matter was resolved by firebombing Dresden and killing 200,000 civilians, and nuking Japan (happy 61st anniversary!). My take was that we don’t open up the Bible and find all the answers in, say, Psalm 23 -- to pick a random example. Wisdom is found where it’s found, and doesn’t appear in the index. Plans are necessary, but sometimes the opposition demurs.

My take was that fighting terrorism is like fighting crime. Sometimes “society” is all for cable TV and sensual massages, and sometimes it’s for solitary confinement for life. It goes in cycles, and neither one is wisdom. Is prison about rehabilitation? -- about punishment? -- about warehousing undesirables? Whatever. Same with terrorism. Define it, and work out a competent-seeming plan, but understand that one size does not fit all, and that for all the care we might put into definitions, it’s really more than one thing.

There’s that 10% on the bell curve of human aggression, that will just be vile, given an excuse. Oh, Allah wants violence? Got plenty right here. Come and get it -- or let me bring it to you. These are the Holy Martyrs of the Lesser Jihad, and a heroic lot they are. Takes a real man to knife open pregnant women. Then there are the camp followers, the blackguards, the mixed multitude, the cheering by-standers. In Islam, that’s about 89%. As for that core Islamist minyan, I’ve said it before: some people simply need to be killed. By the beneficial example of their violent demise, others are chastened. If we can kill them under color of authority, with a clear path from cause to effect, a primal instinct is addressed in the human psyche, enough to call out that cowardice necessary under some circumstances to survive. Add to this the enlightened Roman policy of family-guilt, where the parents are punished for the treachery of the son, and the incentive is magnified greatly.

The tag-along Islamist will reconsider his sect, and convert on the spot to something more moderate. This is how liberals become conservatives: they get mugged. By reality. Because there is no race that is genetically fanatical. Given a choice between clearly different outcomes, negative or positive -- well, it’s a great mind-clearer. I can blow myself up while murdering Jews, and as a result my father also will be hunted down and killed … or, I can live and let live.

Maybe I’m not very American in this opinion. But it does seem to be my opinion. I do not want an American Empire. But the British Raj wiped out the horror of Suttee (Sati, where a widow was expected to immolate herself upon the funeral pyre of her dead husband), and the Thuggee cult of Kali (the Hinduist murder cult which at its height yearly strangled 40,000 innocents, totalling perhaps two million murders. Yeah, Islamism. Allah, it seems, is Kali with external genitalia.) Suttee and Thuggee were extreme religious practices, certainly as deeply-ingrained and evil as anti-Semitic Islamism. The price of wiping out monstrosity is that a certain brutality must be employed. You do not talk a demon to death. Informants, pardons and many public executions wiped out the Thugs, and persuasion and criminal charges eventually dampened the urge to Suttee. Maybe such measures couldn’t work today, what with CNN and the NY Times running interference for Iran. But it usually works.

A third gentleman in the sauna, who thought it not at all inappropriate to display his entirely external genitals in a most free-wheeling manner, dropped his two cents worth by saying that all sorts of things have been tried, and the one that never works is appeasement. This we all agreed was true. Then he mentioned how electric cars can recharge 90% of their batteries in 10 minutes, nowadays -- and one's in the works that can do it in seconds. I guess that would be the cable TV and massage part, the passive part of how to deal with terrorists. Gently starve them of their petrodollars. Indeed, I opined, whatever Tom, Dick or Harry got the balls rolling on the electric revolution would be the new Bill Gates, the new Henry Ford.

At this point I had lost my ten pounds, and wobbled out to a fountain, that I might drink two and half gallons. Yes, I slosh. But everyday finds me more beautiful than the day before. At least on the outside. If such a thing is possible.

Did I mention my one-armed chin-up?

J