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Now welcome to the award-winning BestOfAlaf podcast with HLIP today from Common Sense with Dan Carlin, Progressive Faith Sermon with Dr. Roger Ray, on the media, Democracy Now, Counter-Spin and The Young Cups.

Part of what makes these situations interesting to me are their predictability. I mean, there's certain human elements, and we've talked about this before, connected to the tactic of terrorism.

And if you're like me, I've always been fascinated with tactics and strategy, and it runs the gamut from obviously, you know, I'm a war gamer, and I like doing that kind of strategy, but to boxing and to things where it's all about trying to figure out, you know, approaches and box people in and look at how things work.

And terrorism is an emotional weapon, and human predictable human responses, especially when you're talking about masses of people instead of individuals.

Predictable human responses often play into the goals and approach and methods and everything that terrorism employs. It's designed to impact, you know, more than just the military situation.

The reason it's even called terrorism is, you know, to terrify someone is to take a very human thing, to be afraid, and to work on that, right? That's that whole you dig deep or every time.

So there's an emotional component to this. It may be impossible for us to react in cool, calm, clear headed ways when these things happen.

And if so, then that's something that's built into the use of the strategy and the tactic itself, right? People in large numbers will not behave rationally. They will not think long term. They will not step back and try to analyze this situation from a cool, logical long term perspective, because when people are dying and being blown up,

and they're your family members and you feel unsafe, people just don't do that, right? This may be hardwired into who we are, which makes terror as a weapon so unbelievably insidious and still fascinating.

Let's remember, terrorism also runs the gamut throughout history. The British thought American colonists shooting behind trees were terrorists.

The Germans thought partisans fighting in the Balkans against their occupation forces, which by the way tied down lots of German military forces. They thought they were terrorists.

And obviously, people who take pleasure and glee in the killing of innocents and women and children and all that, that to me is the worst of the worst.

And I said many times and as have many others, and I think you often hear this from people trying to justify or mitigate what the terrorist side of things does. They'll say, well, you know, you kill women and children in our countries too.

You're over here using drones and the vast majority of the people that get killed by the drones are not the people you're after and you kill women and children and blah, blah, blah. Yes, but we don't sit there and celebrate it. It's a mistake.

That doesn't excuse it at all and we've often brought this subject up, right? But it is a mistake. We do not celebrate it. There's something weird to the minds of most people.

When you see people celebrate that, there's that woman's fashionable shoes poking out from under a shroud laying on a street corner by broken glass outside of cafe. Who the hell celebrates that?

It's hard for us to understand and we want to, we want to kill those people. That is a normal human response.

And many people out there, including yours truly, would say, and maybe you justify a human response, right? If you could get your hands on those people, you pretty much be able to justify anything you could do.

That is an emotion that is understandable, defensible, predictable, and part of the tactic.

If this were a boxing match, I said, I like the strategy and tactics in boxing. This is a jab, folks. They are stinging you with a jab and it makes you mad. So you want to lash out, which is great if you can hit them.

If I walk up to some guy on the street, some big dude and throw a jab at him, he's going to hit me in the face and knock me out. Boom, don't throw a jab at a guy like that.

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