I think you're right to take this stuff seriously. At some point one must stop believing that someone or some group that constantly threatens you really means it, especially when there's past evidence to back it up.
I look at it this way...
If one Saturday morning you wake up to find your crazy paranoid neighbor standing on his front porch screaming "I'm going to get you Mitch!" you might safely brush it off as simple deranged bluster. But what about the next week when he's standing on his front lawn yelling "Okay Mitch, your time is coming!" Well, probably just had too much to drink again this morning.
The following week he's at the base of your driveway demanding you vacate the neighborhood or "stuffs gonna happen!" You still dismiss him as a simple nut. Well, what about next week when a rock comes through your window? Or the week following when a burning turd shows up on your doorstep? Are you going to take him seriously then or wait until the smoke detector goes off in the middle of the night? What if you can't get out of the burning house? Will you regret not taking the lunatic more seriously sooner?
I would have thought that 9/11 would have woken people up to realize that sometimes you must act against the simple threat instead of waiting for the actual incident to occur. Some, and in fact many here, seem to get that. I'm not sure the majority of folks do.
I continue to be concerned that in labelling so many of these "warnings" as the boy crying wolf we'll miss the warning that actually we should have caught and paid attention to. Natch, I hope I'm dead wrong, but this dual eclipse thing during Ramadan does unsettle me a little. These nutjobs do seem to enjoy their symbolism and Islam is rife with it, it seems.
No question, that seems to be the case. I also think that "crying wolf" is part of AQ's psychological war plan, and every time Homeland Security bumps the color code, AQ is laughing, knowing that at some point the alert system will become meaningless. And while we should be concerned about the dirty nukes and chem/bio attacks, AQ could explode a half-dozen homocide bombers in Grand Central Station or Penn Station or both in Manhattan during rush hour and kill thousands of people.