Don’t Forget
Image thanks to Michele (back when).
2996: tributes to the victims of the September 11 attacks.
Wizbang has an excellent roundup. As does Pajamas Media.
Meanwhile, Gates of Vienna talks about The Other September 11th. Also talking about yet another September 11th: OPFOR.
If you have forgotten…. I recommend watching September 11, 2001 - by James Lileks.
We still remember, do you?
Image thanks to Michele.
Pajamas media has a slideshow (that is not a permalink - so it may not be there tomorrow).
The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary “gateway” to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on “a journey through the history of freedom"–but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines. To the IFC’s organizers, it is not only history’s triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man’s inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich’s Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona.
This is appalling. I found the link to it at Vodka Pundit’s site. Needless to say, he also wants this stopped. I suggest we make sure this travesty is known to everyone in the US. If you are a blogger, please blog about this. If you aren’t, please e-mail that article to everyone you know. Thanks.
NEW York property tycoon Donald Trump has unveiled his design for “bigger, stronger and better” twin towers to replace the World Trade Centre destroyed on September 11, 2001.
Denouncing the existing plans for rebuilding Ground Zero as the “worst pile of crap architecture I’ve ever seen", Mr Trump argued that erecting two new, even taller twin towers was the only valid response to the terrorists.
I won’t quite agree on the ‘worst pile’ — some of the designs that didn’t win were even worse — but I do agree that, barring my favorite design (which probably can’t be built) — Trump’s idea is the right one. Hat tip: Chrenkoff, who wants to know what you think about it (so do I.)
With a large tip o’ her chapeau to I-P, MB would remind all you folk out there that we need to stay the course with a steady hand on the wheel of the Ship of State, a hand already proven who has set us along the path to restoring freedom around the world to those who do not have it and protecting us here at home.
If you need reasons, these photos will remind you why !!
Winds of Change did a big roundup of Sept 11 posts and sites. Well worth reading, even on Sept 12.
Trackbacks from other posters are welcome.
As for me, I remember. And I’m spending the day helping to board up the 4plex. With luck, that will cause Ivan to go way west or turn into a tropical depression(we won’t really have a real idea until it gets as far as Cuba).
[update] Other roundups:
Jeff Quinton (as if you wouldn’t have checked him anyway). He also has his own story posted.
Blogs of War which also has some good site links.
[another update] Go read Erik Svane’s “What Have We Learned from September 11?“. That’s an order. You won’t regret following it.
It really happened.
The same sort of atrocities have been committed, before and since, all over the world. Many of us would like to forget. Many would like to go back to our safe (if only in our imaginations) little world.
I’d like to go back to that world myself. But I shan’t. The world has not changed that much — but I have. I’m awake now. I will not go back to sleep.
Sing your lullabies, pass out your soporifics, euphemise atrocities as you wish. I’m awake, and I’m not the only one. We remember, not just September 11, 2001 but also Bali, and Beslan, and the innumerable other atrocities perpetrated in the name of a sick ideology. We see you now. Beware our wrath.
From our friend Bill in Texas, where they understand things very well. Although we’ve not tracked down the authorship, yet [although it is claimed, here], we feel this is too important to pass by…it needs to be passed along, for the message is too good to overlook.
A Military Story – Don’t Close Your Blinds
The other day, my nine year old son wanted to know why we were at war. My husband looked at our son and then looked at me. My husband and I were in the Army during the Gulf War and we would be honored to serve and defend our Country again today. I knew that my husband would give him a good explanation.
My husband thought for a few minutes and then told my son to go stand in our front living room window. He said “Son, stand there and tell me what you see?”
“I see trees and cars and our neighbor’s houses.” he replied.
“OK, now I want you to pretend that our house and our yard is the United States of America and you are President Bush.”
Our son giggled and said “OK.”
“Now son, I want you to look out the window and pretend that every house and yard on this block is a different country” my husband said.
“OK Dad, I’m pretending.”
“Now I want you to stand there and look out the window and pretend you see Saddam come out of his house with his wife, he has her by the hair and is hitting her. You see her bleeding and crying. He hits her in the face, he throws her on the ground, then he starts to kick her to death. Their children run out and are afraid to stop him, they are screaming and crying, they are watching this but do nothing because they are kids and they are afraid of their father. You see all of this son…. what do you do?”
The War on Terrorism Comes Home to Roost
Catawba Nuclear Station, the place where I work, is located a little more than 25 miles southwest of downtown Charlotte, North Carolina. As you can tell from the picture below, the six cooling towers in the foreground are quite visible from the air. I live about 8 miles east of the station as the crow flies, and one can see the cloud of water vapor from those towers quite distinctly from there, or from much farther out, for that matter. For that reason, airliners will frequently use Catawba as a navigational reference point as they pivot around on their final approach to Charlotte-Douglas International Airport.
We can’t forget, can we? He’s in Charlotte, where a guy was just arrested for taking pictures of large landmarks. Financial buildings, transit systems, dams… things like that.
Michele, we haven’t forgotten. And we won’t.
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One thing that struck me as odd in the days after 9/11 was Bush saying “We will not tolerate conspiracy theories [regarding 9/11]". Sure enough there have been some wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the events of that day. The most far-fetched and patently ridiculous one that I’ve ever heard goes like this: Nineteen hijackers who claimed to be devout Muslims but yet were so un-Muslim as to be getting drunk all the time, doing cocaine and frequenting strip clubs decided to hijack four airliners and fly them into buildings in the northeastern U.S., the area of the country that is the most thick with fighter bases. After leaving a Koran on a barstool at a strip bar after getting shitfaced drunk on the night before, then writing a suicide note/inspirational letter that sounded like it was written by someone with next to no knowledge of Islam, they went to bed and got up the next morning hung over and carried out their devious plan. Nevermind the fact that of the four “pilots” among them there was not a one that could handle a Cessna or a Piper Cub let alone fly a jumbo jet, and the one assigned the most difficult task of all, Hani Hanjour, was so laughably incompetent that he was the worst fake “pilot” of the bunch. Nevermind the fact that they received very rudimentary flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, making them more likely to have been C.I.A. assets than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So on to the airports. These “hijackers” somehow managed to board all four airliners with their tickets, yet not even ONE got his name on any of the flight manifests. So they hijack all four airliners and at this time passengers on United 93 start making a bunch of cell phone calls from 35,000 feet in the air to tell people what was going on. Nevermind the fact that cell phones wouldn’t work very well above 4,000 feet, and wouldn’t work at ALL above 8,000 feet. But the conspiracy theorists won’t let that fact get in the way of a good fantasy. That is one of the little things you “aren’t supposed to think about". Nevermind that one of the callers called his mom and said his first and last name, more like he was reading from a list than calling his own mom. Anyway, when these airliners each deviated from their flight plan and didn’t respond to ground control, NORAD would any other time have followed standard operating procedure (and did NOT have to be told by F.A.A. that there were hijackings because they were watching the same events unfold on their own radar) which means fighter jets would be scrambled from the nearest base where they were available on standby within a few minutes, just like every other time when airliners stray off course. But of course on 9/11 this didn’t happen, not even close. Somehow these “hijackers” must have used magical powers to cause NORAD to stand down, as ridiculous as this sounds because total inaction from the most high-tech and professional Air Force in the world would be necessary to carry out their tasks. So on the most important day in its history the Air Force was totally worthless. Then they had to make one of the airliners look like a smaller plane, because unknown to them the Naudet brothers had a videocamera to capture the only known footage of the North Tower crash, and this footage shows something that is not at all like a jumbo jet, but didn’t have to bother with the South Tower jet disguising itself because that was the one we were “supposed to see". Anyway, as for the Pentagon they had to have Hani Hanjour fly his airliner like it was a fighter plane, making a high G-force corkscrew turn that no real airliner can do, in making its descent to strike the Pentagon. But these “hijackers” wanted to make sure Rumsfeld survived so they went out of their way to hit the farthest point in the building from where Rumsfeld and the top brass are located. And this worked out rather well for the military personnel in the Pentagon, since the side that was hit was the part that was under renovation at the time with few military personnel present compared to construction workers. Still more fortuitous for the Pentagon, the side that was hit had just before 9/11 been structurally reinforced to prevent a large fire there from spreading elsewhere in the building. Awful nice of them to pick that part to hit, huh? Then the airliner vaporized itself into nothing but tiny unidentifiable pieces no bigger than a fist, unlike the crash of a real airliner when you will be able to see at least some identifiable parts, like crumpled wings, broken tail section etc. Why, Hani Hanjour the terrible pilot flew that airliner so good that even though he hit the Pentagon on the ground floor the engines didn’t even drag the ground!! Imagine that!! Though the airliner vaporized itself on impact it only made a tiny 16 foot hole in the building. Amazing. Meanwhile, though the planes hitting the Twin Towers caused fires small enough for the firefighters to be heard on their radios saying “We just need 2 hoses and we can knock this fire down” attesting to the small size of it, somehow they must have used magical powers from beyond the grave to make this morph into a raging inferno capable of making the steel on all forty-seven main support columns (not to mention the over 100 smaller support columns) soften and buckle, then all fail at once. Hmmm. Then still more magic was used to make the building totally defy physics as well as common sense in having the uppermost floors pass through the remainder of the building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly, as falling through air, a feat that without magic could only be done with explosives. Then exactly 30 minutes later the North Tower collapses in precisely the same freefall physics-defying manner. Incredible. Not to mention the fact that both collapsed at a uniform rate too, not slowing down, which also defies physics because as the uppermost floors crash into and through each successive floor beneath them they would shed more and more energy each time, thus slowing itself down. Common sense tells you this is not possible without either the hijackers’ magical powers or explosives. To emphasize their telekinetic prowess, later in the day they made a third building, WTC # 7, collapse also at freefall rate though no plane or any major debris hit it. Amazing guys these magical hijackers. But we know it had to be “Muslim hijackers” the conspiracy theorist will tell you because (now don’t laugh) one of their passports was “found” a couple days later near Ground Zero, miraculously “surviving” the fire that we were told incinerated planes, passengers and black boxes, and also “survived” the collapse of the building it was in. When common sense tells you if that were true then they should start making buildings and airliners out of heavy paper and plastic so as to be “indestructable” like that magic passport. The hijackers even used their magical powers to bring at least seven of their number back to life, to appear at american embassies outraged at being blamed for 9/11!! BBC reported on that and it is still online. Nevertheless, they also used magical powers to make the american government look like it was covering something up in the aftermath of this, what with the hasty removal of the steel debris and having it driven to ports in trucks with GPS locators on them, to be shipped overseas to China and India to be melted down. When common sense again tells you that this is paradoxical in that if the steel was so unimportant that they didn’t bother saving some for analysis but so important as to require GPS locators on the trucks with one driver losing his job because he stopped to get lunch. Hmmmm. Yes, this whole story smacks of the utmost idiocy and fantastical far-fetched lying, but it is amazingly enough what some people believe. Even now, five years later, the provably false fairy tale of the “nineteen hijackers” is heard repeated again and again, and is accepted without question by so many Americans. Which is itself a testament to the innate psychological cowardice of the American sheeple, i mean people, and their abject willingness to believe something, ANYTHING, no matter how ridiculous in order to avoid facing a scary uncomfortable truth. Time to wake up America.
[ed note: This comment was left here to prove that there are some people who really will believe ANYTHING.]
Comment by Enlightenment — 27 Oct, 2006 @ 22:54