As anyone who’s viewed Signifying Nothing’s sidebar can probably guess, I don’t think much of the homeland security threat level thingy—mainly because it’s a bogus five-point scale, since we all know it’ll never fall below yellow nor go higher than orange (making it a dichotomous variable for all practical purposes, a weakness that James Joyner expounds upon here), but also because it’s essentially meaningless to the public at large. That being said, Dean Esmay does have a bit of a point worth considering.