2/22/2005 05:22:00 PM|||Dave|||Don’t show this research to John “terrorism is a nuisance” Kerry. (Story via SciTechDaily). The resultant cognitive dissonance might cause him to put on his L.L. Bean jacket and go hunting again.
Short of seeing the actual study, I would posit as an auxiliary hypothesis the idea that nation-states have historically responded to terrorist events on a reactionary, case-by-case basis, not in any sort of proactive, systematic way. (Israel might be the one exception; they don’t pussyfoot around with PC “profiling” worries et al, hence: no airline hijackings in decades, an inverse relationship between expansion of the Gaza fence and a decline in suicide bombings, etc.). Post-9/11, of course, more proactive measures have been undertaken, with the Left proffering serious resistance to such proactive measures.
“Statistically speaking, it seems that things can only get worse. A study of the statistics of global terrorism concludes that attacks will become more severe in the future, and that an attack that kills as many people as the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 is likely within the next seven years.
“It all sounds very depressing and seems to imply, depending on your viewpoint, either that the 'war on terror' is essential or that it is futile. But can we really assert these things based on statistics alone?
“Computer scientists Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, have analysed the data on terrorist attacks compiled by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City. They say the numbers follow a 'power-law' relationship.
“A graph of the number of attacks n plotted against their severity x (in terms of injuries and/or fatalities) reveals that n is roughly proportional to x -1.85. Put simply, this means that the frequency of attacks decreases as their size increases - which is what you'd expect - but also that this relationship holds for events ranging from those that injured or killed just a few people to those that, like the Nairobi car bomb in August 1998, produced over 5000 casualties.
“This might sound like no more than a formal way of presenting the statistics, but the power-law relationship has startling implications. For example, Clauset and Young say that the statistics suggest a strong probability of an attack as devastating as that on the World Trade Center within seven years…”
Many on the Left, of course, view 9/11 as an isolated incident. Should something similar hit us again, the Left's position will falter under the weight of its own contradictions. For example, more people here in the U.S. will begin to question the prudence of randomly pulling a Chinese or Black grandmother out of an airport line for search vs. deploying our limited resources in more statistically valid ways (e.g., pulling Arab males between the ages of 18-31 out of airport lines for searches).|||110911096392021088|||Mathematical Probability of Terrorism