The first in a series I’ve been planning for a while: I call it “Let Me Tell Ye,” in homage to one of the Nurse’s lines from Romeo and Juliet — one night while watching the show it struck me that it would be a great title for any random rants and thoughts of the day. Here goes the first:

Tonight while rearranging my apartment, I watched a lot of documentaries between the Military Channel and National Geographic. Probably about nine hours straight. They all started to run together, but there was a definite theme, especially on Nat Geo, that a lot of them were about potential methods of future terrorism, such as nuclear weapons, dirty bombs, and biological attacks.

You ever watch shows like that and think, “Gee guys, do you really think it’s a good idea to be telling everybody about all the things our security procedures don’t cover, and how a terrorist could exploit those weaknesses?”

And then when that inevitably gets said, somebody else will be quick to add, “This may not be common knowledge to the average person, but any terrorist already knows this stuff and they aren’t learning anything new by watching these programs.”

Well let me tell ye…

If I have become sure of anything this week, it’s that terrorists thankfully appear to be pretty stupid. Like mind-blowingly stupid. I mean if it was your main goal in life to carry out a glorious attack in the name of Allah or whoever, and you can’t even manage to detonate a bomb — I’m not just talking about the guy in Times Square, I mean like all the terrorists we’ve ever encountered in and around the US since 9/11 — they foil our security a number of different ways, but then demonstrate they actually have no idea what they’re doing.

So now I’m not so sure that they already know all this supposed Terrorism 101 stuff. If they don’t know that some types of fertilizer aren’t explosive, how do we know they already know that only a tiny percentage of containers entering New York Harbor ever get inspected?

Maybe in light of this new understanding, we should be a little more interested in keeping potential threats in the dark cave of ignorance of which they are clearly the inhabitants, instead of assuming there’s no new tricks we can teach them, just in case they ever get the hang of the “make something go ‘boom'” part.