... Meanwhile, any American traveler is more at risk of being ran over by a bus on their way to the airport, than of being targeted by "conventional or unconventional weapons."
Still, in the case of human life, I have nothing against trying everything to make people aware. Its just the fearmongering bit I dislike.
If I am going to spend a significant amount of time extending my life, I'm going to focus on the big things that prevent an early demise: exercise, diet, and having meaningful relationships.
If the gov't said "For the next week, car travel will have heightened risk", people might take notice.
The problem is that foreign travel is safe and all this fear-mongering is unjustified.
99% of people who travel to a foreign country are completely safe. Saying anything to the contrary is pure fear-mongering.
Which is silly when they're more likely to die in a crash on the way to the airport than during flight or while abroad. It's completely illogical and actually gives weight to the actions of terrorists.
If the World Health Organization issued a world-wide alert that going outside in the month of May 2016 will have an increased risk of death from bees, you might be annoyed to have to dig through obscure, possibly unpublished analyses to find that the increased risk was +0.001% due to projected shifts in the bee population relative to 2015.
That straw-man example of announcing nearly nothing would probably be in practice more statistically relevant to people's lives than this one. Yet, here we are discussing how "foreign travel is not safe" with no information we can use to determine how much anyone should actually care.
It's like issuing an advisory about getting papercuts filling out paperwork in a war zone. No one is so marginal that it should make a difference.
It's not that the travel advisory thinks the risk is actually lower in the US, it's that the internal US security is outside the purview of the state department.
Paying attention to this "advisory" means what, exactly? It doesn't say anything. It doesn't provide any information at all. It's just pointless fearmongering by the very people who have the most to gain by having you the citizenry be vaguely afraid of ill-defined threats who might or might not be trying to harm you in unspecified ways at unknown times at any location anywhere. So the only thing that paying attention to it does is make you afraid, and therefore perhaps more likely to approve of giving the federal government (who wrote this worthless piece of trash) yet more unconstitutional power over your life. It cannot possibly help you in any way, because it doesn't tell you anything.
The best thing to do is demand the impeachment and removal from office of everyone responsible for this idiocy, and then vote out of office every single politician who supports, endorses, echoes, funds, or in any way permitted, encouraged, or enabled it. Every last one. That may not make you any less likely to be killed or injured by a criminal (of some kind, somewhere, sometime, maybe), but at least it will end the pointless asinine fearmongering that does zilch for public safety.
Then you do get it. But because terrorism is scary it gets more mind-share than mundane but more deadly things like driving.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Yes, but the risk of getting run over by a bus at the airport isn't changed from its normal level right now, so there is no reason for alert for that.