9-11

What can I say that hasn’t already been said?

Of course we remember those that died. It was tragic. It was a national slap in the face. Ordinary people died and ordinary people became heroes.

How about let’s remember the thousands dead and tens of thousands of injured Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen since then, too. They seem to be easy to forget, unless you are trying to score political points for whatever your stupid argument is, then you mention them daily until your man wins, then you forget about them again. Funny. I used to remember the daily body count on the news up until a few years ago, when it became inconvenient to the narrative. Meanwhile, my friends are still there.

There are men fighting right now that were in grade school when the towers came down. Grade school.  They were eight or nine. Now whenever I go to a  public place I see amputees in their early twenties. Never forget… Yeah… Thanks for reminding me.

I’m annoyed at people who are too scared to talk about terrorism seriously because they are afraid of being labeled racist or politically incorrect telling the rest of us to Never Forget. I’m angry that video that is too “inflammatory” to show on TV the rest of the year is now okay, because it is a designated anniversary, and in a couple of days it will go back in the vault.

Meanwhile, my best friend is defusing roadside bombs in a third world hellhole right now, and being forced to put his life and his teammates lives at greater risk because of the idiocy of COIN doctrine. We send good men to almost certain death because we’re worried about offending the locals.

Then we have some of our men do stupid things and commit crimes. Yes. It happens. Prosecute them. But I’m supposed to believe that some corporal that went off the plan, lost his shit, and murdered somebody is morally equivalent to blowing up thousands of innocents? No. It isn’t. The last person that told me water boarding was exactly the same as terrorism almost got punched in the face, and they didn’t even know it.

Israel has the statistical equivalent to a 9-11 happen several times a year in their tiny country, but some of the same Americans saying Never Forget today, don’t hesitate to tell the Israelis that they need to make concessions and peace with the men that have attacked them over and over and over. Hypocrites.

And while so many Americans are putting their lives on the line, here we are ten years later and most of our response to 9-11 has been stupid kabuki theater. Anyone that knows anything about security laughs at what we’ve done. We’re feeling up little old ladies. That’ll show them. The Homeland Security director is more worried about returning vets as potential threats that Islamist terrorists and NASA no longer has a manned space flight program, but is proud of its mission to boost self esteem in the middle east. A $500 handgun in the cockpit of each jet on 9-11 could’ve prevented the whole mess, but the government spent the next decade making it as bureaucratically difficult as possible for pilots to be able to carry guns. Why do that when you can form gigantic new pointless federal agencies?  

I used to work with a lot of counter terrorism professionals. There have been so many awful, terrible, sometimes ridiculous plots stopped before they came to fruition that most people have no flipping clue what is out there. I’ve only ever seen a handful of these make the news, and those are just the ones I know about. They are still out to get us.

The whole thing pisses me off in a lot of different ways.

You want to pay your respects? Go do something nice for one of our warriors.

Updates: D6 countdown and my goatee is missing
A new short story of mine: Son of Fire, Son of Thunder

21 thoughts on “9-11”

  1. I think the arming of the populace (or at least segments of) is a great solution, but it’s a bit of an uphill battle.

    I’ll be part of the legion color guard at the ceremony this afternoon, and my VFW and AL posts make pretty damned sure there’s an appropriate remembrance every year.

    It’s an ongoing war, but it’s *our* war, and we need to educate and allow the citizens to be involved. (without lynching American Arabs)

  2. Want to do something real for the troops?

    Operation Gratitude

    http://tinyurl.com/lcshhx

    An outstanding organization. Been working with it for years.

    Also, if you know any returning vets, remind them of the VFW and the American Legion, which offer useful benefits for separating troops. For those with special needs, check out the Disabled American Veterans.

  3. A-frikkin-Men. I’d like to add, that if you want to “escalate” and be a “patriot” and “good citizen”, go do something nice for one of our warriors every week. You can go out of your way to walk across the lane in the parkinglot to shake the hand of the guy (or gal) with the Purple Heart or Disabled Vet license plate, or say thanks to the person with the _____ (insert military branch here….and yes, Coast Guard is a branch) sticker on their bumper. That’s the very least, and coincidentally, the easiest. Costs you nothing.

  4. Larry, Well said! A simple handshake will do a wonderful thing for a returning warrior, trust me, I know it does. I was honored to have my hand shook by a MACV Vet, when I returned from the first Gulf war. Its the simple acts of respect that are remember for a lifetime by the returning warrior. God Bless the troops.

    Keep your powder dry and your knife sharp.

  5. Indeed. I’ve yet to hear of the TSA stopping anything that remotely resembled an attack (and given that the FAA’s Red Team gets by them in excess of 90% of the time we can be pretty sure they aren’t just keeping it quiet), and I’ve heard quite a few stories (several of which are public and/or official) about the CIA, NSA, and various other nation’s intelligence agencies stopping actual, real, serious attacks.

    Meanwhile we’re refusing to use assets we have over in the sandbox because we might upset some locals. Folks, there are two kinds of locals over there. The ones who would really like the terrorists gone and a shot at national self-determination, and the ones who want us to die. The former aren’t going to be offended, and the latter already hate us. As long as we’re pragmatic about our actions, the former group will back us to the hilt because they KNOW we’re the best shot they have, and they’ll keep shedding blood alongside us.

  6. NASA may be messed up in a lot of ways (what bureaucracy isn’t?) but it’s not accurate to say that it no longer has a manned space program. It doesn’t at the moment have the ability to launch people into space, but it does retain an astronaut corps for staffing the ISS, and is slowly building a new vehicle to launch its own astronauts again. We’ve had an interruption like this before, between Apollo and Shuttle — the current gap is only projected to be half as long, and about as long as the post-Columbia stand-down. It’s not the end of the American manned space program.

    More importantly, though, NASA is assisting several private companies in building their own manned vehicles, the idea being to jumpstart a private industry in manned spaceflight. It’s highly likely that one of these companies (SpaceX) will actually beat NASA’s own efforts and thereby shorten the post-Shuttle “gap” in manned access. That is a step in the right direction, and the sole policy for which I will give the Obama administration kudos. The sooner we turn access to space over to private companies, the better.

    But yeah, the outreach thing…meh. Not NASA’s job.

    1. The Constellation program, intended to replace the shuttle, was cancelled. I’m unaware of anything else in development by them. Frankly, NASA is a joke at this point. They can’t put a man in orbit but they’re very proud of themselves when a satellite proves some aspect of Relativity Theory that most physicists assumed was true anyway. NASA has long since ceased contributing to aerospace development, which is stagnating anyway as the whole of the western world begins to decline. But I guess they’re good at settling bets in the faculty lounge?

      Honestly, NASA itself should’ve been retired with the shuttle. We can’t afford what they’re trying to pass off as a space program. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy has overtaken NASA, and I think their glory days are long passed. You could triple their funding and they still couldn’t recreate the success of the Apollo program. Just like Lockheed almost certainly couldn’t repeat the SR-71 program if they needed to.

      As for Space-X…good for them, until a dozen different government agencies start interfering with their attempts at spaceflight. I wish them success, but hold out no hope. I think it’s time we just faced up to the fact that all of us who grew up looking at the stars, we didn’t get the future we hoped we were going to get.

      1. The rest of Constellation was canned, but Orion was preserved as the “MPCV”. Planned first flight (unmanned) is in 2013.

        Since I work on Orion, I’ll refrain from agreeing with you in detail…..

  7. All I can say is amen to that. Drove from the Netherlands to Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre in Germany in January in support of “Cooking with the Troops” in order to show my gratitude for the sacrifices the men and women in uniform make on a daily basis.
    And the whole circus of so-called safety and protection measures are just that: show and window dressing. How dare they treat returning troops as being a danger after sending them to foreign grounds to be shot at, maimed or killed? It’s useless, shameless and disgusting.

  8. Larry,
    Thank you!
    Mike,
    Thank you very much for your service! S!

    To the rest of us…

    I say this with all due respect and seriousness.
    We are not patriots, we are not brave, we are not free.
    Our generations are nothing more than hypocrites and spoiled rotten children reared on cable TV, MTV, game systems, internet pron, and fast food to go with our muffin’ tops, high cholesterol, and growing lists of ailments. We are chained to a system of our own making mostly due to our indifference.

    The real patriots and heroes remember what it is like to face down the biggest and baddest in the world and say things like this.
    And I quote:

    “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” End quote.

    In essence, dear people, our founding fathers signed their own death warrant with a giant “Screw you, King George!” and added a long list of reasons why.

    Ben Franklin is attributed, I believe, with saying something along the lines of, “If we don’t surely hang together, gentlemen, surely we will all hang separately.”

    So until we all stand up to and in front of our ‘out of control’ local and state bureaucracies and tell them:

    “No! You will not bother kids with lemonade stands!”

    “Profile those who really are the danger! Not 3 year olds crying for their Mommies and old ladies with wheelchairs!”

    “You will not allow prosecutors to be uncontrolled and unfettered to charge as they please without common sense! Put a leash on those lawyers, dammit!”

    “Political Correctness is a violation of liberty and freedom!”

    “EVERYONE has the right to defend themselves and their property, period! Now get a clue!”

    “No more debate about property taxes! They are BAD! I own my house and land therefore you aren’t entitled to one more penny simply because I worked my butt off to get it! Find the money elsewhere and more honestly! Raise the income tax or gas tax or sales tax! At least if I don’t buy anything or work anywhere for anyone you won’t take my home if I simply become self sufficient!”

    “Arm the public, arm pilots, arm train engineers, arm the cable guy down the street, arm the school teachers in the schools, arm the street sweepers, arm the clerks at the seven-eleven, arm grandma and grandpa Kettle if we have to! Israel does it and it works wonders for crime and terrorism!”

    Sorry, ranted too much.

    But here is the last one.

    “You were elected to office! Congratulations! Here is the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of The united States, the Bill Of Rights, and the Amendments to the Constitution. Read through all of them, then take this test that is given to all incoming people who have applied for citizenship. You fail, you don’t get to serve!”

    Ok, that last one was a simple prod at the idiocy of those in office and the MSM who don’t even know the basic parts of the Constitution. I had a local councilman argue the Second amendment with me….he lost terribly. He couldn’t explain why if it is a “Right” granted to us by the Constitution, then why did the State restrict it as though it wasn’t a right?
    Yeah…he didn’t like my lesson on how that restriction can now be applied to ALL “Rights” when viewed in that same light.

    God Bless all of you!

    Ray

  9. You also have people who aren’t worried about being called names, they just don’t want to think about it. Couple of years ago was talking to a lady and mentioned my fears of a Beslan-style attack; she’d never heard of it, so I gave a brief summary. Her response: “I just don’t think about things like that.”

  10. I’m with you all the way Larry, my father was a firefighter for 30 years, had training in terrorist preparedness for emergency service back in the 90s and would teach it to various agencies back when nobody cared.

    He ended up losing his life to a brain disorder and spent his twilight years in a wheelchair where the crack security guys at TSA could make a special example of patting him down and trying to make him fill out special forms cause he was wheelchair bound. Our lack of common sense security since 9/11 have actually really pissed me off too.

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