How many untold billions will we spend? How much indignity will we endure - do you suppose we'll all be flying naked if there's another failed incident by some Islamic clown? How many bombs will we drop? How many people will die - all because America is a nation of chicken shit cowards? We all pay lip service to a country that so reveres freedom that we're all willing to die for it. Die? For Freedom?
That's a funny joke. Americans - particularly the right wing, are so frightened for their lives, that we KILL for freedom - our freedom to be free from fear - but liberty and justice? That's pre-9/11 thinking, Liberal Wimp!
Read Nate Silver today and be ashamed:
Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.
Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.
There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.
If that doresn't convince you of American cowardice and voer reaction read this from UK Times Online::(it's a few years old, but very relevant):
Let’s do the maths.
In a powerful paper for the libertarian American think-tank the Cato Institute, Professor John Mueller provides strong support for the Parris argument. He points out that "in almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States". He adds that even including the September 11 attacks, the number of Americans killed by terrorists since records on this were kept is about the same as those killed by lightning, accident-causing deer or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.
To this evidence he adds the research carried out at the University of Michigan that suggests that an American’s chance of being killed in one non-stop airline flight is about one in 13 million. Apparently there "would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out" between travelling by plane and by car.
Feeling better? No? Try this from Reason Magazine:
But how afraid should Americans be of terrorist attacks? Not very, as some quick comparisons with other risks that we regularly run in our daily lives indicate. Your odds of dying of a specific cause in any year are calculated by dividing that year's population by the number of deaths by that cause in that year. Your lifetime odds of dying of a particular cause are calculated by dividing the one-year odds by the life expectancy of a person born in that year. For example, in 2003 about 45,000 Americans died in motor accidents out of population of 291,000,000. So, according to the National Safety Council this means your one-year odds of dying in a car accident is about one out of 6500. Therefore your lifetime probability (6500 ÷ 78 years life expectancy) of dying in a motor accident are about one in 83.
What about your chances of dying in an airplane crash? A one-year risk of one in 400,000 and one in 5,000 lifetime risk. What about walking across the street? A one-year risk of one in 48,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 625. Drowning? A one-year risk of one in 88,000 and a one in 1100 lifetime risk. In a fire? About the same risk as drowning. Murder? A one-year risk of one in 16,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 210. What about falling? Essentially the same as being murdered. And the proverbial being struck by lightning? A one-year risk of one in 6.2 million and a lifetime risk of one in 80,000. And what is the risk that you will die of a catastrophic asteroid strike? In 1994, astronomers calculated that the chance was one in 20,000. However, as they've gathered more data on the orbits of near earth objects, the lifetime risk has been reduced to one in 200,000 or more.
So how do these common risks compare to your risk of dying in a terrorist attack? To try to calculate those odds realistically, Michael Rothschild, a former business professor at the University of Wisconsin, worked out a couple of plausible scenarios. For example, he figured that if terrorists were to destroy entirely one of America's 40,000 shopping malls per week, your chances of being there at the wrong time would be about one in one million or more. Rothschild also estimated that if terrorists hijacked and crashed one of America's 18,000 commercial flights per week that your chance of being on the crashed plane would be one in 135,000.
Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.
So do these numbers comfort you? If not, that's a problem.
Let's be serious for one moment. The attacks of 9/11 were horrific and frightening. But they were an anomaly that by all measures should've failed - even Bin Laden expressed surprise at the effectiveness of the crashes into the WTC. But that being said - is there REALLY a threat from Islam and Al Qaeda? Is it possible that such a dangerous entity - Al Qaeda, and the millions of Muslims who call America home, have been unable to pull of anything better than the ass-clownery of the Shoe Bomber and the Nigerian Moron? I'd suggest that we've been lied to - that Al Qaeda is a titular entity - and little more...