October 27, 2006
Rambling thoughts...
Optimism is not a Christian virtue. Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what you want to see and not seeing what you don't want to see. Hope is facing reality with eyes wide open and saying, nonetheless this is what we're going to do by the grace of God. --Fr Richard John Neuhaus
I'm in a bit of a grim and cranky mood today. There are various things that don't look good to me. This new blogger, Reconquista, is crunching numbers and graphing Islamic terror attacks. I don't like the smell of what he's coming up with. Trouble.
...From this picture it’s immediately apparent that the attacks come in surges, with a fall-back between surges, as if they’re girding their loins for the next surge. Every new surge goes higher than the one before, and every fall-back doesn’t fall back as far as the previous one. It also looks as if the height of the surges is accelerating – each one increases attacks by a greater amount than the previous one did. It’s not absolutely certain from this view, but we can return to it later. There is a ratchet in operation.
Also, you might have noticed that we are currently in a fall-back stage, and might be wondering when the next surge will start? Strange as it may seem, the world is currently experiencing a – relative – lull in terrorist attacks, with another surge about to begin. Well, that’s what it looks like from this picture, but let’s revisit the monthly pictures armed with this new insight....
Thinking about more trouble on the way makes me doubly bitter about the appeasement and weakness and indecision that has got us into this mess, and is even now making things much worse.
And reading Mark Steyn's America Alone has made various things I was already thinking much more real and pressing. Is Europe past the point of no return? I've been suspecting so, and Steyn is painfully persuasive. One of the feelings that has got me down is a sort of mourning. Grieving. Countries like France and Germany are like much-loved uncles and aunts to me, and the thought of their senility and foreseen death is a bitter thing to deal with.
I'm finding myself somewhat more in accord with the Malkinites---"Islam is the problem." Maybe so. But what's their strategy? What's their long-term plan? Bellyaching is not a plan.
And I think they have no Christian Charity. For instance, the people who suffer the most from Islamic terrorists are ordinary Muslims. They are being killed in far greater numbers than are Westerners. It should be our goal to save them as well as ourselves. If possible.
I do not, by the way, have any sympathy with the view of certain people that Christian Charity means letting ourselves be kicked around, or means sitting by passively while tyrants oppress the weak or while genocides rage. That's just stupid. (And they don't even believe it themselves. it's just Christian tinsel draped over their real belief: Appeasement and Western self-hatred.)
Charity requires extending ourselves to fight evil and injustice. The world we are in now often puts us—either America or the ordinary citizen—in the position of the policeman who must shoot to save hostages or prevent murders. Both for individual and country, focused extreme violence is sometimes the Christian duty. And hand-wringing and indecision is sometimes a sin. We should be thinking about this. Thinking clearly. And mostly we are not.
Also, Fourth-Generation Warfare means that the "front" can be anywhere, anytime. The ordinary citizen can become a soldier in the blink of an eye. Like the people on Flight 93. I think that should be one of the central thoughts of all of us. (And I fault the Bush administration deeply for not emphasizing this, trusting instead in bureaucracies and plans. Pure folly.) Are you ready? Am I?
Another thing buzzing at the back of my brain is a dinner Charlene and I attended recently, honoring a quintessential "radical priest." That evening was, well, thought provoking. I could blog a lot about it, but probably I should just keep mum. But one thing we got to hear a lot of was how abu Ghraib was apparently the worst thing that had happened in recent years. Since I had in mind the fact that in Darfur about 10,000 people are being killed a week, the rants about abu Ghraib were...well, I'll just stick with "thought provoking."
A huge genocide is happening right this moment. A war in fact, an internal war. One of the bloodiest in history. And the only thing that can stop it is American military intervention. And who is stopping us from ending this war? In a large part is is the "anti-war" people. The "pacifists." The Christians so-called, whose "Christianity" consists mostly of Bush-hatred and leftist cliches.
Posted by John Weidner at October 27, 2006 08:05 AMSpeaking of "terrorism"...
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.
Posted by: Enlightenment at October 27, 2006 02:09 PMSpammers for moonbattery...lovely.
Posted by: John Weidner at October 27, 2006 02:42 PMSeriously, why are these lunatics given the time of day?
But this one little point struck a nerve.
Then exactly 30 minutes later the North Tower collapses in precisely the same freefall physics-defying manner.
No.
On this blog we obey the Laws of Physics! Deal. With. It.
Posted by: RobW at October 27, 2006 03:38 PMThere's an interesting book, the name of which escapes me, about the physics of the collapse of the towers, and the similarity to the pyroclastic flows that buried Pompeii. Weird fascinating stuff. And, needless to say, not "physics-defying"
Posted by: John Weidner at October 27, 2006 04:42 PMI believe the book was put out by Popular Mechanics, who originally ran a bunch of articles on the subject.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at October 28, 2006 06:47 AMIt's not that one. It is Ghosts of Vesuvius: A New Look at the Last Days of Pompeii, How Towers Fall, and Other Strange Connections
Posted by: John Weidner at October 28, 2006 08:21 AMOh, okay. I didn't realize there was another one besides the Popular Mechanics one.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at October 28, 2006 08:25 PMSpammers for moonbattery...lovely
LOL! My thoughts exactly!
Posted by: Ethan Hahn at October 30, 2006 04:48 PM
