Monday, July 11, 2005

Terror Richter Scale

Since the recent bombing in London, several reporters and media personalities, including everyone’s favorite Rush Limbaugh, have called these attacks “unsuccessful” because the death toll was only 40 (at the time the statements were made) with “only” 150ish injuries.

Only an idiot thinks that the death toll is what is important to a terrorist strike. The real purpose of such a strike is to demoralize the target society, watch the government step up their police actions as the population loses their freedoms one-by-one. They want people to lose faith in their governments ability to protect them, while causing the people to live in fear, as their nation becomes a police state.

Sadly, it has become obvious that for the sake of the media and for reporters everywhere who use the Body Count Index (BCI) as a measure of success for terrorist strikes that an objective scale is required. It is with great regret that I must formally introduce the Terror Richter Scale based on the Body Count Index—TRSBCI.

Terror Richter Scale Number

Body Count Index

Terror Rating

0

0

Unsuccessful

1

1

2

10

3

100

Marginal

4

1,000

5

10,000

Acceptable

6

100,000

7

1,000,000

Successful

8

10,000,000

9

100,000,000

Superior

10

1,000,000,000

10+

>1,000,000,000

Insurmountable

So as we can now clearly and objectively see, the London Bombings were not an Unsuccessful attack, it was a Marginal attack. Also by this scale, we can quantify that the September 11th attack was an Acceptable attack. And we can all sleep comfortably, secure in the knowledge that to date, we have yet to see a Successful terrorist attack.

Just for the record, I would like to say to all the reporters and media personalities who called the attacks unsuccessful (that we now can see were clearly Marginal), piss on all of you. The loss of a single life is far too many; the grief of one family makes it a Successful attack.

Do we need to have peace with every nation/group/person on the planet? Of course not. What we do need is a state of non-violence and non-war that will allow us to cohabit this planet.

1 comment:

Flop said...

Actually, I'd argue that the purpose is to sow fear, rather than corpses. Ask DC-area residents if that sniper caused fear or not? Hell, I was looking over my shoulder at night here in New York. Then again, critiquing Rush Limbaugh is a total waste of time, anyway.