The talking dog says to calm down and to remember that life goes on. He's right, of course. Even while we may perceive ourselves as living in extraordinary times, what we do every day is simple. We get up and feed the kids, send them off to school, go to our work for eight hours, come home, fix dinner, watch a little television, and then we sleep the sleep of the righteous and the scared.

The Times of London story to which the dog links discusses our reactions to terror and how paranoia contributes to further fear.

ADDITIONAL PARANOIA: Via Three-Toed Sloth, I see that Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", is now on the web.

As the preacher says, "there is no new thing under the sun."