It’s been 22 years since the 9/11 attacks. We have an entire generation, and are starting a second, that has no memory of the event.
Last year, or maybe in 2021, I despaired that the nation had not learned the necessary lessons from 9/11 – or, worse, had learned the wrong ones.
Or maybe our political class has succeeded in ignoring them. They were not, indeed, the ones that paid the price that morning in NYC, Washington or Pennsylvania, or in the two decades of war that followed.
Of course, entropy is real – especially when combined with a failing education system. Significant numbers of Americans don’t believe the Holocaust happened, to say nothing of having any serious knowledge about 9/11.
Either way – Barack Obama’s greatest triumph maty have been convincing a plurality of Americans that its greatest enemy was not from outside, but was America itself.
I’m going to recap something I wrote on this date 14 years ago, when the clear moral lens was fogged for different reasons.
Today is the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
You’ve heard a bit about it today, no doubt. You’ve read a bit about it on this blog over the years. Along with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s the single most pivotal event of my adult lifetime.
And, as my radio colleague/partner Ed Morrissey notes over at Hot Air today, his as well:
While New York City and Washington DC (and Shanksville, PA) are far removed from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, that really only mattered in our sense of impotence as the towers collapsed and the Pentagon burned. We knew that the terrorists didn’t attack New York City for being New York City, or Washington DC for being Washington DC. They had attacked America for being America — and that made it all local and personal.
Which is something some Americans – on all sides of our political “aisle” – have forgotten since then. They didn’t attack cities, or coasts, or electoral blocs; they attacked America. And all of America responded.
And continues to.
For me? It wasn’t just an attack. It was the world sinking back into some very bad habits. I wrote this on March 11, 2002 – a month into this blog’s life, six months after the attacks.
I grew up in rural North Dakota, not far from the vast fields of Minuteman III missiles, close to the glide paths of the B-52 bombers,. all of which were on alert for my entire cognitive life. I was keenly aware of the presence of all of those first strike targets, forty miles away. And while I may have been one of a minority, growing up around all of that did affect me – there was a long-standing anxiety that my life and the entire world around me could be incinerated in seconds, or irradiated away, without warning.
The Berlin Wall fell about the time my oldest child was born. It would be easy and melodramatic to tell you that knowing my daughter would grow up in a world without that tension hanging over her was a wonderful, liberating sensation – but it’s the truth.
I was driving to work on September 11. I was on 394, by Xenia/Park Place. I’d just flipped over from KQRS’ interview with PJ O’Rourke to MPR’s live coverage of the attacks, without warning. And as the day wore on , and the shock sank in, that exhilaration – covered by the many other emotional layers of an adult’s life – sank away. The threat is different – but it’s still the same.So my kids are growing up in the same world I did, now. The threat is less omnipresent – I dont’ suspect the Twin Cities are high on any terrorist’s hit list – but more visceral. Maybe that’s a good thing – it’s harder for this threat to fade into the background of daily life.
Like Ed, I wanted to do something. But I was a 38 year old newly-minted single father with a bum knee and a bad eye – not the kind of person the military was going to be bidding for. I had no job skills the military needed, even as a civilian contractor (unless I got a PhD in usability and human factors – and that wasn’t going to happen).
The blog was as close as I got to something remotely useful. I started it five months after 9/11, the very day I learned what a “blog” was and how I could do one.
But I changed some other things. I’ve always loved shooting -and I got more diligent about it since 9/11. I’ve come to believe it’s the duty of a law-abiding citizen to have the knowledge and means to defend themselves, their families, their communities and their freedom. And while I don’t rationally believe there will be terrorists skulking through that shadows of Saint Paul, ever (even though “domestic terrorism” has bounced off the far corners of my life, once), the knowledge that I can pile a few of ’em up like cordwood if I need to helps with one of the most important things a human can do; replace fear with purpose. It doesn’t matter if evil wears a turban, s**tkickers or anything in between; the ability to shoot it in the face equalizes a lot. It’s not fear (I keep having to explain to lefties, who too often just don’t get it); it’s pre-empting fear.
I have also gotten more proactive about making sure government leads, follows or gets out of the way. In the wake of 9/11, before the blog, I asked my kid’s principals, adminsitrators and other school officials “What would you do if, say, a tank car of anhydrous ammonia blew up at the Empire Builder yard, and a cloud of poison were heading toward the school?” I was distinctly underwhelmed with their answers – but no moreso than those of the nameless bureaucrats at the World Trade Center who told everyone to stay in place. I’ve marveled – and found immense comfort – in the stories that showed that Americans do maintain our tradition of not needing authority and officialdom to react properly to events, in ways big (United Flight 93’s passengers’ counterattack) and small but profound (the people in the WTC who organized their own orderly evacuation, long before the firemen got there; absent the thousands of office-dwellers who thought for themselves and took care of each other, the death toll would have been vastly higher). And as best I can, I’ve tried to bring my kids up with the idea that this nation,l it’s ideals, its people and its history, is something exceptional – even more worth defending than it is worth attacking. Has it stuck? We’ll see, I’m sure.
So on this eighth anniversary? It’s a good time to remember.
And head to the range. And send the world’s scumbags a message.
Actually a box of messages.
Biden released a statement condemning the attacks memorializing the victims without mentioning who carried out the attacks and why. MN Senator Tina Smith retweeted the statement, again without mentioning who carried out the attacks and why.
Ann Coulter’s column from September 12 captured my thoughts exactly. Still does.
https://mahoundsparadise.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-911-column-that-got-ann-coulter.html
Walz did the same thing, Ironically, after not mentioning the attackers and their motivation, Walz ends his tweet with “never forget.”
Ann Coulter’s column from September 12 stated my opinion precisely.
“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.”
Can’t link it for you because it’s in moderation. Doesn’t that just say it all?
” They didn’t attack cities, or coasts, or electoral blocs; they attacked America.”
Yes, but why? Why do head chopping muzzies hate America so much? Is it our wealth? Our degeneracy? Rap music?
Maybe, but all of Western Europe is just as wealthy and degenerate, and rap is a global crap taco. Why not hit the Eiffel Tower? The Brandenburg gate?
What is it about America that makes it different than all other Western Democracies in the eyes of Arabs, Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians, 75IQ Somali terrorists, Iraquis, Palestin….ahhh, wait; right.
Our greatest ally.
But hey, it was worth is, right? After all just think of all the good things we get from the trillions of military and economic aid. Where would we be with out all the…uh, well, you know, that good stuff we get.
I dunno, Blade. Even Bin Laden’s November 2002 letter didn’t pin the blame solely on them. I think this was merely one battle in a war which started long before the Balfour Declaration resulted in the Partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel.
See: the Reconquista, Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, Urban II’s speech to the Council of Clermont calling for the First Crusade . . . for more than 1000 years the plague of Islam has threatened Christendom. That’s why Ann Coulter’s prescription is clear-eyed while RINOS who demand we fight against certain tactics (war on terror) are blind. It’s not a war on terror, it’s a war on people who use terrorist tactics, and we know who those people are. We’re just too squeamish to end it, once and for all.
You’re strengthening my position, Bigman. All those crusades were planned, financed and carried out from Europe, long before there was a Great Satan.
Why not attack Spain, or Italy?
Follow the money, and the weapons shipments.
But forget the financial costs for now. Add the cost of 9/11, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq (and we’d dishonor their memories not to remember the lives lost on the USS Liberty) in the human lives sacrificed for our greatest ally, you’d not be wrong.
Nobody knows nothing about what happened or why. I read people on gab making just as cogent arguments as the two above about how 9/11 was an act of Jewish terrorism (I don’t know why).
I do know this tho’. Link A serious country would’ve closed the border and started deporting foreigners after an attack that killed thousands of its citizens. But that’s not what happened at all. Instead, we invaded foreign countries and started importing the people we were bombing.
He forgot the part about how we also created yet another huge government bureaucracy with police powers.
And send the world’s scumbags a message.
Alas, these scumbags are now your neighbours.
I don’t think the Israelis did the deed, jdm, but they were certainty the proximate cause.
Also, remember the “dancing Israelis”?
Turns out they were connected to Mossad. My thesis is they were dancing for joy, knowing American soldiers would once again fight their battles for them. And would send them lots and lots of missiles.
They were not wrong.
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Everything is connected to the Mossad.
Over the two decades since this occurred, a lot more information is being acquired and released. The FBI confiscated all of the security footage in and around the Pentagon that day. Tom Fitton from Judicial Watch, obtained video footage through a FOIA request, that shows a missile hitting the building; not an airplane. The more I research this, learning about Operation Northwoods and knowing about the black ops arms of the government, the theory of this being a false flag, doesn’t seem far fetched or conspiratorial. Collateral damage is SOP for the Communist cabal running our country.
I must confess that I was looking forward to what kind of horse manure Kremlin Tom would be sharing, and I was not disappointed. Hey, he’s doing pretty well lately, only being an order of magnitude or two off on how much aid we’ve provided Israel. That’s a lot closer than he usually is.
boss, when I wrote that nobody knows nothing, I was also implying that anything is possible. Including missiles.
The same government and security services that were responsible for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal pulled off 9/11? Are you serious, Bosshoss? Any president, even a doofus like GW Bush, would burst out laughing if such a thing were ever proposed to him.
Yeah, the geniuses who pulled off the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and attempted and failed to assassinate Castro dozens of times had a plan to fake a terrorist attack that kills 3,000 people.
MP, they succeeded with JFK.
Communist cabal ruining our country. There, I think this is more appropo, boss.
It’s a documented, undisputed fact that the US federal government worked with the Italian mob to assassinate Fidel Castro. There’s also a convincing, and growing body of evidence that the CIA was involved in wacking JFK. They outright lied about Covid, and they are supporting a corrupt, organized criminal organization in a war that may well end up with a nuclear exchange.
But hey…they got your best interests at heart.
The CIA managed to kill Kennedy with one shot, but they failed to kill Castro after a dozen assassination attempts. Got it.
I simply cannot understand conspiracy theorists. Why do people who believe that aliens a visiting the earth in spacecraft not believe in ghosts? Too outlandish?
There are probably millions of people in the world who will tell you that they had first hand experience of seeing a ghost or ghosts.
The covid conspiracy is right there, we watched it unfold in real time.
Well MP, I have seen numerous UFOs and three ghosts. Further, about six years ago, while placing flowers on my dad’s grave for his birthday at Ft. Snelling, I met an elderly (older than me) woman at Ft. Snelling. She was about twenty feet away, slightly behind me visiting her husband’s grave. It was a sunny, 75 degree September day, but I felt a cold chill from my left to my right shoulder. She approached me and said that she didn’t mean to intrude, but wanted to know if it was my father’s grave. When I said yes. She told me that he was standing right next to me, with with arm around me. I called her out and asked her to describe him, which she did so perfectly that chills ran up and down my whole body. The day we buried him, is one of those events that burned into my brain, so when she described the suit, shirt and tie that he was wearing, I almost lost it. It was his favorite suit!
So, call me a crack pot if you want to, because idgaf.
Some of us know when to switch from conspiracy theorists to reasoned skepticists .
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12500341/Paul-Landis-Secret-Service-JFK-assassination-magic-bullet.html
I’m holding onto the Bob Wills/Jack Ruby conspiracy to kill Kennedy.
There are some really odd features of human psychology. The world we find ourselves living in seems to be a kind of controlled projection or hallucination created by our mind (the real world has too much sensory info to be processed, so we imagine the world and we “see” that world until something important enough to require dedicating our massive brain power happens). It is important to note that when a person says “I saw a ghost!” they are talking about a memory.
My personal belief is that when we comprehend a thing, our brain tries to make its comprehension efficient by fitting that thing into a pre-existing category that the brain thinks is the most accurate representation of that thing. So when people see something truly fantastic, something that is literally unimaginable, our brain sticks it into an existing category, and we remember it as being a thing in that category, with associated “remembered” visual information. People used to see angels, now they see aliens. What they really saw is something they could not represent with conscious thoughts and words.
My mother’s husband swears that he saw a flying saucer back in the 1970s. He can describe it in perfect detail. He was driving in rural Wisconsin at night, saw a car stopped in the road in front of him. When he got close enough he saw that the reason the driver in front of him had stopped was that a flying saucer was blocking the road. When he describes the flying saucer it is literally like someone describing a cheap flying saucer prop from a 1950s scifi movie: saucer shaped, as wide as the two lane road (so maybe about 20 ft across), with a little round cupola on top with transparent port holes. He said he could see through a port hole the silhouette of a person working on the controls of the flying saucer. And then it zipped straight up into the sky.
My mother’s husband is a squarehead farmer from Centuria and an ex-marine. He is not what I would call an imaginative or creative person.
I guess I’m thinking that what he saw that night was something far more wonderful and strange than a space alien in a flying saucer.
As always, look to the metainformation around these saucer sightings. Almost all of our own spacecraft are unmanned. Yet we always imagine that these alien space craft are piloted by living beings.
Sorry for the long rant, but I don’t want to leave the impression that my imagination is simply too dull and rigid to believe in the fantastic or the supernatural.
MP, please account for Nazca lines. Let’s start there. Or are they imaginary as well?
Nazca lines? First think if there is any possible way they could been laid down by ancient locals 2,000 years ago. Any possible way. Hot air balloons, clever use of geometry and surveying equipment, anything that was actually possible by people as smart as we are.
That is your answer.
2,000 years ago people were no less clever than the people of today, and people are very clever indeed. The ancient Greeks knew the world was round because they knew that lunar eclipses were caused by the Earth’s shadow on the moon, and that since the eclipses always had the same duration no matter what time of night they occurred, therefore the earth must have perfect symmetry, meaning the earth must be spherical.
You want a perfectly flat foundation for a giant Egyptian pyramid? Build a low mound around your foundation area and fill it with water. Put sticks in the water throughout and mark the water level on the sticks.
There are true mysteries out there. The Sphinx is one of them. Hard to tell how old it really is, might go back to the Mesolithic, or earlier. We know a lot about how Stonehenge was built, but not why such an expensive thing was built (labor spent working on Stonehenge was labor not spent growing food).
We all know about the ice ages, but the Earth has only had ice ages for the last two million years. Before that, the Arctic Ocean was ice free year round. No one knows why the earth started experiencing ice ages a few million years ago. No one can explain the so-called “snowball earth” that existed 800 million years ago, when glaciers plowed stone at what was the equator.
Hot air balloons, clever use of geometry and surveying equipment, anything that was actually possible by people as smart as we are.
That is your answer.
2,000 years ago people were no less clever than the people of today, and people are very clever indeed.
You are kidding, right? Why no evidence of these advanced tools etc? Another even cleverer people destroyed them to get dumber? Theodilites 2000 years ago? Dude!
MP, I eas expecting more from you. You offered the laziest explanation of any anthropologists to whom this is all settled science. “It was all man-made, just that advanced civilization died out”. No evidence of anything about that civilization being advanced, smart has nothing to do with it, you have to know advanced mathematics and physics for surveying and hot air balloon flying. It is smart for a person like you, today, when all of this was already discovered and you know it can be done, but 2000 years ago? Remnants of advanced structures are abound around the world and no evidence of anything advanced about civilizations that built them… not a one. Just the same old lazy dismissal, man-made by civilization that died out. Because you cannot disprove that and damn the evidence.
JPA, the Romans built their network of roads and aquaducts with nothing better than rules of thumb, and they had to use the stupid Roman numerical system.
Best engineering of all time, up til then. And they had concrete, not recreated til the late 18th century CE.
Civilizations die out all of the time. We have actual evidence of this. Do you really think it is likely that space dudes came down from the sky and made the Nazca lines? In the shape of local animals? No camels, no mammoths, just the animals that people knew about at the time and place the Nazca lines were created?
There is no actual physical evidence that there is any life, even single cell amoeba or viruses, that exists anywhere in all the universe but on the earth.
The Nazca lines are preserved because of the unusual environment. It is silly to believe that because the Nazca lines were preserved, any artifacts that might have been used to create the lines would also be preserved.
Most organic material turns to dust within a century or two. So all we see are things like the Nazca lines or the pyramids of Egypt or of Meso-America, or the Standing Stones of Northern Europe. No written records have survived? Must have been built by space people!
How many “Nazca lines” were created in Europe and Asia and Africa and are now lost? Don’t know. No one can ever know. But we find the Nazca lines and imagine into existence whole advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations for which we have no evidence that they ever existed.
And yet, you have no problem believing people 2000 years ago had technology to fly. By the way, no-one, least of all me, are saying Nazca lines were MADE by extraterrestrials.
*shrugs* maybe, maybe not. But I am certain that it is more likely that the Nazca lines were built by human beings than non human beings.
Ok, let me paraphrase: By the way, no-one, least of all me, are saying Nazca lines were BUILT by extraterrestrials. The contention is that something or someone with a much higher level of technology directed their actions. And since they could not have inhabited earth at that time, unless you believe people had technology to fly at that time, they had to be of extra-terrestrial origin. And btw, these types of lines are existant on just about every continent, not just in Nazca, and most predate man’s ability to take flight, as far as we know.
JPA, I could build some Nazca lines, given an large amount of labor and ingenuity. It is just geometry. I can prove that the earth is round with the kind of observations primitive man could do.
MP, primitive men did not posses the knowledge and knowhow you do. To think otherwise is to denounce the laws of evolution, nevermind logic. You cannot prove they had that knowhow other than that Nazca lines DO exist, but that is NOT the proof that will pass scientific scrutiny.