The light bulb must have gone dim in the minds of those who authored Freakonomics.


Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner teamed up to produce that bestseller and now here they are running a blog sponsored by the New York Times.

Levitt provides his own helpful hints on how to go about killing people.



These are all smart people, but somebody around here had a bad brain day.


Levitt and Dubner take turns blogging in a new special "opinion" section of the Times and one posting by Levitt is downright weird.


Here's Levitt's question - "If You Were A Terrorist, How Would You Attack?" After that, Levitt provides his own helpful hints on how to go about killing people. Check it out. It's right there in the Times. I was alerted to this through a debunking editorial in the competing New York Post.


Levitt is professor of economics at the University of Chicago, so that, along with his papers and books, places him atop the mountain of our best and our brightest. But he is also proof that foolishness is not confined to fools. Right there, in that particular Times posting, he opens a discussion, as a "public service," on how to "maximize terror" with minimum resources.


"Hints from Heloise" this is not.


Levitt is asking readers to contribute their own titillating and devilish schemes in virtue of bloodshed. Of about 600 responses, a good number of these, from fellow academics no doubt, are encouraging - to terrorists. I'd say about half are with Levitt in this exercise that could only bring pleasure to the Marquis de Sade and real terrorists out there who can always use our help to further the cause of jihad.


9/11 and the murder of 3,000 Americans - has this now become a joke? Apparently so. I'm not laughing. Are you? I'm all for humor, but there is nothing hilarious about terrorism, especially pointed against America and Israel. London has the jitters, and so does New York and certainly Jerusalem, plus a hundred other places where terrorism is not fantasy, but reality. Not funny.


Over in the Palestinian territories, among the schools of Hamas and Fatah, the curriculum begins with strategies to murder Jews and Christians. American volunteers are unnecessary. Self-inflicting stupidity is not exclusive to American academics. In Israel, the Olmert government endorses documentaries (like Hot House) that disdain and ignore the victims of terror while favoring the terrorists.


Guess who came up with the best plan for what can only be called "Terrorism for Dummies." (Your next book, Levitt and Dubner?) Levitt admiringly nominates his dad for "the best terrorist plan I have heard." This conception, attributed to Levitt's dad, goes on to suggest that we "arm terrorists" and "arrange to have them begin shooting randomly at pre-set times across the country."


I do not think this qualifies as, "Honor thy father."


Proud as Professor Levitt may be about his dad's cleverness, this is not so imaginative after all. Something like this really happened around here several years ago, if we recall the Beltway Snipers "shooting randomly." At about the same time, over in Israel, Tali Hatuel, an Israeli social worker, had just picked up her four daughters from school when Islamic Jihad terrorists approached.


These men used their AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles at point-blank range to execute the four girls - Hila, 11, Hadar, 9, Roni, 7, and Meirav, aged two. The littlest girl was still in her car seat when the slaying took place. As for the mother, Tali, pregnant at the time, she was also shot and killed.


Another beautiful child, Danielle Shefi, aged five, tried to run and hide when terrorists shouldering M-16 and Kalashnikov rifles infiltrated her home in Adora, west of Hebron. She was murdered (along with three other Israelis), but before that she kept hiding from room to room until she found "safety" under her bed. But it was no contest.


(How's that, professor, for "the best terrorist plan I have heard"?)


So all that's been done, and keeps on happening. We don't quite need a suggestion box, in the form of a blog, to dream up terror tactics.


To keep it simple, just ask O.J.


I said about half of the readers contributed happily, even giddily, to Levitt's proposal. But then there was the other half, like this:


"You have got to be kidding. Ideas for terrorists? Think you are being cute? Clever? You are an idiot."


Also this: "Thanks for the tip. I'll pass it along to the rest of my cell - Twit!"


An 80-year-old lady I met on the train (today a librarian in Waterford, formerly a captive

We don't quite need a suggestion box... to dream up terror tactics.

in Auschwitz) told me that when the Nazis came and cordoned off her town of Krakow into ghettos, the most unlikely people did much of the harm:


"Nurses and doctors took babies from their cribs and smashed them against the wall. How can you explain such behavior from educated people?"


I can't explain. I leave that to the professors.


Jack Engelhard's latest novel, The Bathsheba Deadline, predicted the Hamas takeover, the kidnappings of journalists and more over the course of two years and 12 installments on Amazon.com! Part 12 of this serialized novel, the first published by Amazon, can be accessed here. Haven't started reading it yet? Click the link and scroll down - all previous installments are there and ready to be downloaded.