I was listening to NPR on my drive home. The London terrorist bombings were all the news and it was very much the subject for the entire length of my drive. At one point the host introduced Jessica Stern, Malkin professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. I wish I’d recorded what she said, but she made the most inane assumptions about the terrorists who might have carried out the London bombings. She suggested that the terrorists performed ”an extremely complicated attack” and were ”well organized” because ”it [is] so difficult to coordinate simultaneous attacks.” Say what? Is she kidding? I hate to break it to you Jessica, but a wristwatch and a cellphone are all anyone needs to coordinate anything. Things continued to drift from reality when she surmised that possibly up to 10 people were involved. Again, how could she know this? Attacks on London by terrorists are obviously few and far between, so how is she even able to take a stab at coming up with this information? The entire interview smelled of impending bad karma as she continued to parade outrageous assumptions such as how the people who planned the attack were obviously local and couldn’t have possibly all come from someplace like, say, Saudi Arabia or Syria. Scotland Yard, on the other hand, did not have any solid information about the perpetrators, and even if they did, this woman was not privvy to such data. I can only assume she based her assumption on the fact that there’s a large Muslim population in London. For the next few minutes she continued to talk about the terrorists as if she lived in the apartment next door — in fact, she outright sumised that they lived in an apartment. I wonder where she came up with that one? As we all know, terrorists prefer condos over apartments. No, wait, they prefer to own. Or wait, wait — they’re leasers. Yeah. I turned the station off in disgust. I did some quick research and it turns out that this woman makes her living talking about terrorism and making the same type of wild conjecture during her lectures as well as writing entire books on the subject of terrorism. I need to write some books about terrorism, too, apparently. That’s where the money is.