Simon Says Blow Up An Airplane

So the terrorists have figured out how that by mixing chemical compounds they can create explosives. Simply amazing. They are truly masterminds of evil who are capable of concocting terrifying plans of destruction. I’ve never heard such a villainous scheme.

Well, okay, I did see it in Die Hard 3, but other than that it’s truly original.

Alright, the bad guy in Batman Begins kinda did the same thing, but other than that”¦

All kidding aside, we had to know that they would eventually try something like this. Any moron with an internet connection can go online and find the instructions on how to make explosives. Why would we assume the terrorists to be any different?

I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that the terrorists have won. Game over for us. They’ve accomplished their objective and reduced us to a bunch of paranoid scaredy-cats. Realistically, that’s all terrorism can do. The terrorist knows that he cannot confront his enemy head-on, so instead of direct military engagement the terrorist will resort to various acts of violence that ultimately function as psychological warfare. They attack our symbols in lieu of our military, because they know that subconsciously we rely on those symbols to make us feel safe.

They’ll never defeat us physically, so instead they try to defeat us mentally by attacking our collective feeling of safety and well-being. The chief goal of terrorism is the propagation of fear, and to that end I say that they have won.

I’m more scared of being stung to death by Africanized bees than I am by terrorists, but by what I’ve seen on the news I’m apparently in the minority. For all you terrorist-worriers out there, take a gander at this little statistic:

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.

You’ve got a better chance of dying from eating a Taco Bell burrito with tainted meat than you do from a terrorist attack.

And yet, they’ve got us scared to death of another attack; so much so that we willingly let our government recall our civil liberties in exchange for “keeping us safe.”

What a bunch of bullshit that is. You do know that the British government only found out about the “Gatorade plot” because someone turned the terrorists over to the authorities, right? Yeah. They had no idea about it until someone in the Muslim community grew suspicious of the behavior of an acquaintance. Don’t be fooled by our administrations despicable attempt to capitalize on this incident as a means by which to secure their political standing. Increased security, the patriot act, nor the republicans had a damn thing to do with the capture of these potential terrorists. We can chalk their capture up to the keen observations of responsible British citizens and nothing more.

Increased security had nothing to do with their apprehension, but just like with that shoe-bomber we’re in a classic overcorrection. Now no one can bring any liquid on board an airplane for fear that they’ll mix it together and blow up the plane. How hard would it be to smuggle a vial of liquid in you shorts onto the plane? Metal detectors couldn’t detect a vial of chemicals. The only way to stop people from taking that kind of stuff onboard is to strip search each and every passenger.

But then some guy will smuggle some C-4 on a transatlantic fight via his ass. Rectum”¦damn near killed’em!!!

I give it a year until we’ve outlawed people on airplanes altogether. We’ll just have whole fleets of passengerless planes flying around the globe, because as you know, we wouldn’t want the terrorists to think they’ve won.