Global War on False Alarms, Strange Loners, and Juvenile Delinquents

So these people are excited for some reason about this map, which claims to tracks “terrorism and suspicious activity” across the planet. For those who’ve forgotten that the world is a dangerous place,

[y]ou have to see it to believe it, and I really mean to believe it: The world is a very dangerous place.

There’s nothing I’ve ever experienced — short of actually experiencing war or terrorist incidents — that so brings the message home, literally, right to your computer, and so comprehensively, about the need to be vigilant.

Give thanks this Thanksgiving, and every day, and express the same wishes to your friends, that you’re not in those places abroad. But, also, note the incidents in the U.S.

Among the latest “events” that are supposed to have us scraping out our underpants:

• A couple of 18-year-olds in North Dakota tried to buy gunpowder;
• A package at a bank in Las Vegas freaked some people out for no good reason;
• Some Romanian dudes were arrested for having multiple pieces of false identification;
• A “benign device” stopped a DC Metro train for 45 minutes;
• Racist shitheads send harmless white powder to NAACP offices in Atlanta.

This map would work well as a parody, but it appears to be quite serious. On the plus side of the ledger, it appears that non-state actors pose the greatest threat to civilization. If this hasn’t already been turned into the subject of a Glenn Beck special report, I’d start laying bets right about now.