Akkam’s Razor

Today, my mom is flying domestically from Philly to the midwest on business.  In speaking to her last night, she was telling me how concerned and worried she was.  Without going into detail, I told her that it was all nonsense, that being worried only makes her feel like she's doing something and in control, and odds are you are far more likely to die in an automobile accident, too many cheesesteaks, or a bolt of lightning. 

Don't believe me?  Check this out.

There's plenty of reasons to assume that the Administration would be gaming the terror alerts.  Consider the following:

2004 (Election year): Lot of Alerts

2005 (Off-Election Year): No Alerts

2006 (Mid-Term Elections):  Alerts Resume

Never mind the coincidences of timing in the past, evident from the chart from JuliusBlog:

Even the media is suffering terror fatigue - maybe the boy has cried wolf one too many times.  I would never expect that we'd see an article highlighting attempt by the President to capitalize on terror to help his sagging approval numbers and reinforce the war on Islamic fascists.

"It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America," [Bush] said. "We've taken a lot of measures to protect the American people. But obviously we still aren't completely safe."

His remarks came a day after the White House orchestrated an exceptionally aggressive campaign to tar opposition Democrats as weak on terrorism, knowing what Democrats didn't: News of the plot could soon break.

[...]

But a senior White House official said that the British government had not launched its raid until well after Cheney held a highly unusual conference call with reporters to attack the Democrats as weak against terrorism.

[...] 

On Wednesday, Cheney had suggested that Democrats believe "that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home, which clearly we know we won't, we can't, be," he said.

[...]

But Bush's Republicans hoped the raid would yield political gains.

"I'd rather be talking about this than all of the other things that Congress hasn't done well," one Republican congressional aide told AFP on condition of anonymity because of possible reprisals.

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," said another White House official, who also spoke on condition of not being named, adding that some Democratic candidates won't "look as appealing" under the circumstances.

The current flurry of terror warnings doesn't pass the smell test. but no more so than any of the others.  And based on Cheney's 1% doctrine, I guess we have no choice but to assume that they are being honest and forthright with us.

But I am seeing something different…

Domestically, there's been reports of agent provacteurs infiltrating groups as insidious as Grandmothers Against the War (I made that up) and attempting to incite violence.  When examining the last two "big busts", we see a bunch of muslim foreign nationals being rounded up, with the extent of their grand plans of violence being talking smack about it on the internets.

Of course, there's a couple other things…

• The plot is verbatim that of Project Bojinka, a failed plan from 1995 to explode a dozen planes over the Pacific, thus disrupting filght, travel, and commerce.  The reasoning being that no one would know just how many other  
• The plot seems vaguely reminiscent of anyone of a number of MacGyver episodes.
• Blair and Bush knew about and coordianted the release of this information for a whole week before releasing it.  How imminent was the threat that they sat on it for a week?
• Prior to the release of the plot, Cheney made it a point to link Lieberman's defeat over Iraq to a Democratic softness on the Great War on Terror.

There's also an interesting timeline here at the Stakeholders.