Apparently you believe that all well intentioned actions regardless of how different they are have the same result in the end. Cut 100,000 troops to the Army and slash its budget by $50 billion is the same as adding 100,000 troops to the Army and adding $50 billion to its budget. Refusing to capture and interrogate terrorists provides just as much information as capturing and interrogating them. Is there any chance that you can spot the nonsense there? Can you make an allowance for well intentioned but flawed, counterproductive actions resulting from decision making based on ideology divorced from the facts? Is that a possibility? Or does it all devolve to "mustache twirling"? That is just so tedious. Do you pay any attention to the news?

Pentagon Set to Slash Military to Pre-World War II Levels

DOD is great for the 1% of Americans involved with the military. Unfortunately that doesn't do much for the other 99%.

There are vaccines for plague, but other than the military or some travelers not many people get them. Even with treatment the plague still kill around 10% of its victims. When untreated it kill a far higher percentage. About 100 years ago it kill about 2/3 of its victims in the US.

There are plenty of groups associated with al Qaida and ISIS. The fact that one is doing that says nothing about what another has been able to do.

If you substitute "progressive" for Liberals you might be on to something.

It's Official: Leftist-Islamist Alliance against the West
RADICAL ISLAM'S ALLIANCE WITH THE SOCIALIST LEFT
The Leftist-Islamist Alliance in Pictures

Agreed, you aren't an expert, and you don't seem to have enough of an understanding of the issue to make informed judgments about either my views or what is going on. Instead you are substituting your personal wacky views for hard facts and statements by the Islamists about why they are doing what they are. Maybe you could explain how it is that you know better than they do why they are doing what they are doing? You do realize that there is a long history of insurrection and conquest by Muslim peoples that predates "Western imperialism," don't you?

If reestablishing a Caliphate is of "minor importance" and "among the most silly," then why do they keep declaring them? Why are so many Muslim peoples drawn to them?

Your views seem to be little more than a restatement of politically correct nonsense unconnected to the facts.

Maybe you haven't noticed, but the Middle East is full of countries that have had WMD programs involving chemical and/or biological weapons, and even some nuclear programs. The expertise is out there.

The Cold War is long over and the resources assembled to be prepared to fight if it ever went hot started going away long ago, not unlike the heavy lift space rockets (Saturn V) built to go to the moon. Even the people that knew how to build some those things are retiring and dying. They have already had to try to recreate lost knowledge for materials in nuclear weapons. Knowledge and infrastructure a perishable, and that's assuming you aren't actively dismantling them. There are things we could do in the 1950s and 1960s that we can't today without recreating large industrial programs that would take years to put in place.

Being prepared to fight the Soviets 25 years ago doesn't necessarily buy us anything today.

Is the public reaction generally panic? I don't think so. Where do you see the public panicking? The actual reaction is largely indifference by most of the public while commentators like you claim the public is panicking and therefore we should do nothing.

But they have taken over countries before, and endangered many others. You're almost building a strawman there.

The reality is that they have caused enormous damage and killed many tens of thousands of people (at least) using meager resources. In the manner of the classic guerilla they often take what they need from the government.

You're not getting that right in several respects. We should continue to secure all sorts of nuclear related materials, as we have been, to prevent dirty bomb attacks, or the theft or illegal sale of fissionable material. Requiring emergency shelters in new construction of various type of buildings as some countries do wouldn't add much to the cost and could pay off in many different disaster or attack scenarios. The nutters in North Korea already have nukes and missiles, the Iranians aspire to them, and eventually others will get them. Some of the nutters likely to end up with nukes may find their destruction an acceptable trade-off if they get to badly damage the US. Just 9-11 resulted in $100,000,000,000 in damage to the US economy. What do you think it would have been had New York been attacked with a nuke which would destroy more than one building? Patting yourself on the back for not "over reacting" to the aspirations of "guys in a cave"* is going to be cold comfort if you need shelters to meet other emergencies and you don't have them.

*Who have already managed to kill thousands of Americans and probably well over 100,000 around the world.

You might recall that they have recently taken control of sizable territory in Iraq to add to the sizable territory in Syria that they control. You may also recall that there were chemical weapons used in Syria, and apparently not all of that use was by the Assad regime.

One of the problems with the news is that is sometimes gets the story more or less right and your cynicism is powerless to alter the facts.

Many problems in the world are either caused or exacerbated by ignorance of the sort that you have just demonstrated. Al Qaida's goals have nothing to do with what the West does or has done, other than repelling the Muslim invasions 500+ years ago. They want to rule the world, and that means taking over places they don't rule now. Pretending the problem is something other than what it actually is will be very likely to have unfortunate results. The Islamists are teaching their children that they will retake the lands they formerly ruled, and eventually control it all. Now there is a key point here: it doesn't matter if you believe them, believe that they actually believe that, or that they will succeeed. They do believe it, and will act on it, so Western societies and the rest of the world had better be ready for it.

Alarm in Spain over al-Qaeda call for its “reconquest”
HAMAS Targets Spain

The price of denial and PC thinking is starting to be felt in very ugly ways.

Rotherham: In the face of such evil, who is the racist now?

You ask and answer your own question - the important steps to deal with this sort of threat should have been taken long ago. And if we're "lucky" the "insightful" people in government responsible for helping to prepare haven't dismantled the apparatus developed by the previous administration for handling it. It hard to say what the current state is, but if the constant denial we see on this and related topics on Slashdot is any indication .... well .... we're already screwed.

Well, that's assuming they didn't make off with any of the biological weapons developed by Saddam (and there were some) or by Syria where ISIS controls considerable territory and apparently has already used chemical weapons, or that the government scientists from those regimes or the former Soviet Union didn't either sell their expertise or volunteer it to "help the brothers."

And the general public isn't really vaccinated against many of those agents, are they? Also note that amateurs may have a freer hand, especially if they don't aim for a high probability of killing. It is the professionals that are aiming for military grade effectiveness that have to push the envelope. And who says that they aren't buying help from various places, places with considerable experience in "experimental" "evidence based" programs such as North Korea?

Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag

Are we? I can think of some things that probably haven't been done, or funded. Do you think the Obama administration is refilling the vaccine stocks as they expire? I'm not sure I would be confident. After all, they "ended" the war on terror, didn't they?

Is something potentially this dangerous something that we should just ignore? I'm pretty sure there must be some middle ground between denial and surrender to it being "too hard."

It's been known for quite some time that al Qaida and company have conducted lethal experiments with biological agents, even if at times inadvertently. You are also far too dismissive of them. Many terrorists and terrorist leaders have been well educated people: engineers, doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc. You should also keep in mind that al Qaida has previously canceled attacks because they were uncertain that a particular attack would produce casualties of a large enough number to meet their approval and maintain their "brand" as highly dangerous.

Black Death 'kills al-Qaeda operatives in Algeria'

You seem to have demonstrated that contradiction in whitewashing Marx. You over-simplify by focusing on Marx's economic theories* while ignoring the terrible evil that he advocated.

Marx is the father of modern political genocide. (5:18-7:40)

I expect after seeing political genocide in its various flavors that "voluntary" labor isn't too hard to get. That was certainly Stalin's experience.

* And those certainly aren't without their issues.

It's a common courtesy to give the slow kids a head start.

So we can thank you for the success of the Linux desktop then? Fine.