We've Forgotton

[JohnGalt]

Oh we got the depth quiet well. It's just the piss of a whatever thing you said that we don't have. Being slow to anger is a virtue.

 

[Annie]

um, maybe...

but people are defenetly pissed at me. Sorry if i sounded rude on my last post (i dont see how i was)

Posts are numbered, which one?

 

[evancity2]

OH, NOW I GET IT.


you guys thought i was angry at u! lol

i was angry at the situation. The people who forgot. The people who murdurured on 911. Anyway, goodnight, I'll log in in the morning.


post # 40

 

[JohnGalt]

rebel without a causeorclue.

Oh well, at least there is still a tomorrow to make up for this thread...

 

[Annie]

rebel with a causeorclue.

Oh well, at least there is still a tomorrow to make up for this thread...

LOL Did I miss something or is he saying he flamed himself! :rotflmao: :rotflmao:

 

[Annie]

LOL Did I miss something or is he saying he flamed himself! :rotflmao: :rotflmao:

Is that a sin? Any Catholic theologians?

 

[JohnGalt]

LOL Did I miss something or is he saying he flamed himself! :rotflmao: :rotflmao:

Post #40 was indeed his. Hmmm, maybe...
One thing is for sure--- he is a confused man.

 

[JohnGalt]

Is that a sin? Any Catholic theologians?

Past their bed-time.

 

[Annie]

Past their bed-time.

:rotflmao: :rotflmao: :rotflmao:

 

[JohnGalt]

Past their bed-time.

Crap, past my bed-time too. I getta wake up at 5 to go work out! HURRAY! Makes me want to anyway, peace out yall, I wanna get at leat 5 hours in tonight.

 

[Annie]

If you return, some of us not only have NOT forgotten, we know how to counter the nonsense of today. AP put up a headline that those on Flight 93, did not fight back. Truth is, they may not have breached the cockpit, but fight they did:

http://216.111.31.12/details.asp?PRID=32

109 minutes revisited

A cockpit voice recorder revealed this week that the passengers where engaged in a fight with the terrorists when the jetliner plunged into a field in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11.

It is additional evidence that the passengers foiled terrorist efforts to claim another target on the day that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were targets of an attack.



By Brad Todd

Guest column

(Sept. 16, 2001)

It's been, of course, impossible to get past IT.

Even in a country with the attention span of a gnat, we're all still glued to the tube. The 24-hour news channels have heretofore proven they can make anything boring in short order, but this one drips with emotion so thick even they can't wring it dry.

Yep. We're as stuck on it as we were Tuesday morning.

Grocery store checkout banter is still single-subject. I understand it's the only topic at the manicurist's shop, too.I think even children sense how big IT is. The ones who walk by my front door don't have their normal sing-song cadence. There's no screeching. No laughter. They know something's not right.

What is IT?

Something besides the grief, I think -- although the grief is tormenting.

Something deeper than the shock -- although the shock is overwhelming.

No, I think it's the gut-level fear that for the first time in my generation, we were whipped.

Whipped by our own complacency. Our own comfort. Our own insistence on putting convenience ahead of precaution. Our own arrogance that let us forget that the world is a dangerous place.

And the outcropping of that fear is an angst about the new order. How long before we're not behind again? How much time must we spend off the top of the world? Out of control of our own lives?

This, of course, is the angst that people in most of the rest of the world feel every day. And if we look deep inside, we can probably acknowledge that for all our egalitarian pontifications, this is not the kind of equality and fraternal kinship in which we really believe.

I finally admitted this fear to myself three days after the attack. I wasn't particularly proud of it. It seemed like a shallow thing to fret over when such real suffering was all around me -- my house sits just three miles from the Pentagon, after all.

But there it was.

And the aftertaste of the bitter pill of my character flaw was the sad realization that such angst was Osama's primary objective. Buildings and airplanes and, yes, even 6,000 lives, were just the collateral damage. Despite the metaphoric value of last week's bricks and mortar targets, the real core of the Western economy isn't a skyscraper or a government building. It's the can-do swagger of the American worker. And bin Laden's soldiers cut deep into that swagger.

So he won.

Or did he?

I thought so ... until Friday night.

Friday night I watched a Jane Pauley interview with the family of Jeremy Glick. Jeremy Glick was a 31-year-old who flew as a passenger on commercial airplanes for a living. I describe him that way because right now I'm fairly convinced I'm just a 31 year old who flies planes as a passenger for a living...the other parts of my job having become less noticeable this week.

As the interview unfolded, I realized something I didn't know before: Jeremy Glick and the people on United Flight 93, bound from Newark to San Francisco, knew what was happening on the ground.

At 8:48 a.m. Mohammed Atta took a jet headlong into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Eighteen minutes later and accomplice did the same to the south tower.

When Jeremy Glick called his wife, his first question was an attempt to confirm something another passenger had heard on his spousal call: was the World Trade Center story true?

Lizzy Glick paused, thought for a minute, swallowed hard, and told him the truth. Yes, they had. Moments later, still on the line with her husband, Lizzy Glick saw that another plane had run into the Pentagon. She passed that information on as well to her husband, who relayed it to the other passengers.

Jeremy Glick then told her that the passengers were about to take a vote and decide if they should rush the hijackers and attempt to foul up whatever evil plans they had.

He put down the phone and a commotion was heard by those on the other end of the line. Then nothing. A dead line. An aborted missile launch against the town where I live.

That was 10:37 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11... just 109 minutes after Mohammed Atta rammed the first plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

Just 109 minutes after a new form of terrorism -- the most deadly yet invented -- came into use, it was rendered, if not obsolete, at least decidedly less effective.

Deconstructed, unengineered, thwarted, and put into the dust bin of history. By Americans. In 109 minutes.

And in retrospect, they did it in the most American of ways. They used a credit card to rent a fancy cell phone to get information just minutes old, courtesy of the ubiquitous 24-hour news phenomenon. Then they took a vote. When the vote called for sacrifice to protect country and others, there apparently wasn't a shortage of volunteers. Their action was swift. It was decisive. And it was effective.

United Flight 93 did not hit a building. It did not kill anyone on the ground. It did not terrorize a city, despite the best drawn plans of the world's most innovative madmen. Why? Because it had informed Americans on board who'd had 109 minutes to come up with a counteraction.

And the next time a hijacker full of hate pulls the same stunt with a single knife, he'll get the same treatment and meet the same result as those on United Flight 93. Dead, yes. Murderous, yes. But successful? No.

So I think the answer I come to is "yes, but at least not for long."

They did whip us. And maybe those of us who've demanded to be let on airplanes at the last minute fed a culture of convenience that made it possible.

But they only had us on the mat for 109 minutes.

Brad Todd is a political consultant who lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

 

[Annie]

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,46862,00.html

02:00 AM Sep. 15, 2001 PT

The conflict in Kosovo was widely anointed as the first "Internet war."

The aftermath of this week's terrorist strikes in the U.S. shows what a real Internet war looks like.

Computers and digital communications were too few and far between in Yugoslavia for the strife in Kosovo to have been a real Internet war.

But one of the most striking things about the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York was the outpouring of outstanding Internet coverage from ordinary citizens.

And not only was citizen-produced coverage sometimes more accessible than professional news organizations, it was often more compelling.

Amateur videos of the events posted on the Net are full of heart-wrenching expressions of shock, fear and disbelief. Even if the soundtrack is just a string of expletives, it's an emotional response that carries the story home.

And while there were many powerful photographs of the tragedy taken by both professional and amateur photographers, some of the most intimate and unexpected shots came from outside the community of professionals.

Compare, for example, the clichéd photo of three firemen raising a flag against a disturbing shot of a dazed elderly man emerging from the dust.

Of course, a lot of these "amateurs" aren't amateurs at all. They are among New York's creative or media professionals –- photographers, designers and writers.

Written accounts of the terrorist strikes and their aftermath also provided an intimacy that many news reports lacked.

Take, for example, an account from Usman Farman, a Muslim who fell to the ground as one of the towers collapsed.

"I was on my back, facing this massive cloud that was approaching, it must have been 600 feet off, everything was already dark," Farman wrote. "I normally wear a pendant around my neck, inscribed with an Arabic prayer for safety; similar to the cross. A Hasidic Jewish man came up to me and held the pendant in his hand, and looked at it. He read the Arabic out loud for a second.

"What he said next, I will never forget. With a deep Brooklyn accent he said, 'Brother, if you don't mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us, grab my hand, let's get the hell out of here.' He helped me stand up, and we ran for what seemed like forever without looking back."

Most of the amateur content would be inaccessible, or at least hard to find, if not for many of the Web's outstanding weblogs, which function as "portals" to personal content.

Some higher-profile weblogs, Slashdot, Metafilter, Scripting News, Kottke and SiliconValley.com, have done an excellent job of helping funnel traffic to smaller sites, many of which have pictures, accounts, opinions and ideas superior to anything found in the mainstream media.

And while The New York Times, the old, gray lady, was full of bloodthirsty war-mongering, ordinary citizens gathered online to present a wide range of opinions.

Depending on where you looked, there were measured calls for restraint, investigation and thought before action. Of course, there was also plenty of bloodlust, chest-thumping and stupidity, but online there was at least a debate.

"Now we're about to get deeply involved in some nasty, subtle, dangerous politics, and the public doesn't even know who the players are," wrote Eric Kidd to Scripting News' mail page. "The press ought to stop poking people's wounds and start educating the American public before we encourage our leaders to do something stupid."

and there is this: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34378,00.html

and this: http://www.nationalreview.com/ponnuru/ponnuru091401.shtml
even then, Michael Moore had something to say, EXCERPT:

There are, however, exceptions. The worst have been some anti-American outbursts. Noam Chomsky's reaction to the atrocities was to explain that Americans have been guilty of far worse and to fret that the fallout might be "a crushing blow" for Palestinians and good for "the hard jingoist right." What should suffer a crushing blow is Chomsky's (always wholly unmerited) reputation as a deep political thinker.

As should Michael Moore's as an amusing provocateur. Here's an excerpt of "Michael's Latest Message" (forgive the length, but this has to be read to be believed):

We abhor terrorism — unless we're the ones doing the terrorizing.
We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s who killed over 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me. . . .
We fund a lot of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of innocent people, and we never let the human suffering THAT causes to interrupt our day one single bit.
We have orphaned so many children, tens of thousands around the world, with our taxpayer-funded terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador) that I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised when those orphans grow up and are a little whacked in the head from the horror we have helped cause. . . .
In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again. He withdraws from the Kyoto agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists on restarting the arms race — you name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all. . . .
Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California — these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!
Why kill them? Why kill anyone? Such insanity…
Let's mourn, let's grieve, and when it's appropriate let's examine our contribution to the unsafe world we live in.

Those of us on the Right should not imagine that anti-American reactions have been confined to the Left. Consider the exchange between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on The 700 Club, which was brought to my attention by Andrew Sullivan's website. Falwell said, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'" Robertson replied, "Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted their agenda at the highest levels of our government."

There were almost certainly gays and feminists (and Muslims, for that matter) among the innocent victims of the massacres. However misguided we may consider American social liberals, they are Americans. And they did nothing to encourage Islamist fanatics to hijack our planes and fly them into our buildings. To use the attacks as a pretext to continue our culture wars is disgraceful. Even worse would be to suggest that America had it coming because it's sunk in sin. Conservatives, and especially Christian conservatives, should be glad that Robertson and Falwell are long past their prime as leaders.

This being a free country, nothing should be done to keep Moore, Falwell, et al from going off on whatever rants they choose. But civilized people should not let them into their houses.

I guess that will do for now. Do you see Evancity2, that some of US NEVER forgot?