Slashdot Mirror
Marking 10 Years Since 9/11/2001
10 years ago today, coordinated terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. killed nearly 3,000 people. It wasn't the first terrorist attack directed against the U.S., or even on U.S. soil, but it was the deadliest, and came at a time of relative peace. Probably most people reading this remember where and how they heard the news. We've often discussed the consequences of the attack: security cordons, ID checks and metal detectors where none existed before, a reexamination of how U.S. policy affects international perception and attitudes, and the encroachment of surveillance policies and technology, to name a few. Today, we don’t want to inundate you with links to tributes and retrospectives, so we’ll offer the only thing we can: a look back at how the day unfolded here. Our thoughts are with everyone who lost friends and family members.
It's not even November yet.
Isn't that 3000 ppl died, that happens also in car accidents every few months.
It's that USA went from being a respected member of the world community to a nation hated even among its allies. A nation that things it owns the whole world, can torture other country's ppls, can force them to act in ways it wants, and that is in everyone else's face.
It was the day that marked the beginning of the end for the USA.
I try to remember the thousands upon thousands of civillians in the Middle East who have perished, as well as the poor souls in America.
I'm sick of that aspect being completely ignored so often by Western Media.
My hat is off, hand on heart - to all of the victims of the event, and the consequences.
Would love to be able to fly without being treated like a criminal though.
In 1714, the Spanish army crushed the Catalan resistance and imposed their barbarian culture upon them. A whole nation obliterated.
In 1973, the US-backed Pinochet overthrew the democratic government of Chile. At least 3,197 died.
Blaming the attacks on religion is a bit misguided. The attackers were trying to fight against US foreign policies and globalization -- look at their choice of targets (a major global financial center, the US military headquarters, and various US government targets that were thankfully missed). Religion may have been played a small part in convincing the attackers to commit suicide, but the motivation for the attacks themselves was political.
Palm trees and 8
They got us good. They caused the equivalent of a cytokine storm, a massive autoimmune response. We lost important freedoms, likely for good, and bankrupted ourselves financially and otherwise. The world hates us, our economy is in the toilet, the government is hopelessly corrupt, and we STILL haven't won, because no one really wins asymmetric warfare short of turning the insurgents and their country into a smoking glass crater. They did to us what we did to the Soviets not 20 years ago, and we fell for it.
I remember the madness of trying to get details on that day. One of the things that stuck with me is that most of the major media websites were completely overwhelmed. One of the primary methods of gathering information was through comments on aggregation sites like fark and slashdot: http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/World-Trade-Towers-and-Pentagon-Attacked We all leaned very heavily on the internet on that day, and discovered what a blessing (and/or curse) social media can be.
"Religion may have been played a small part in convincing the attackers to commit suicide, but the motivation for the attacks themselves was political."
That "small part" is lethal.
I sure didn't think i'd be spending the ten year anniversary of 9/11 in Afghanistan... but here I am. strange how life works out. i remember on that day, i wanted nothing more then to find the people who'd done it and make them pay... i wasn't in the military back then.
now, i'm here, they know they've won, we've announced our intentions to leave(surrender) and they attack almost daily. their(Islamists) resolve is stronger then ever. ours(average US citizen) is pathetically weak and short sighted. though, it's not like we have any direction or a plan to get behind.
nope, never thought ten years later, this would be happening.
...the families of EVERYONE who lost their lives as a result as a result... Iraqis, Afghans, Americans, EVERYBODY. I may be a little drunk right now but I am completely perplexed as to why everywhere and everybody's thoughts are focused on the people who lost their lives on that day, not the amount of lives that have been lost on the ensuing 3650 days since 2001. My thoughts are with all families of all nationalities who have lost their lives as a result, whether it be an Australian soldier, Iraqi family or an American who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. My thoughts are with you all.
that the terrorists have won.
For some reason, this is the only place that it doesn't bother me to see the 10-year anniversary stuff. I can very clearly remember reading slashdot in an office when news of this began to spread.
What a terrible tragedy the event was.
And what a terrible tragedy the last ten years of response to it has been.
Not really. People have been going on suicide missions for thousands of years without religious motivation. Protecting their tribe and their tribe's way of life has always been enough to convince some subset of the population to die, and there's a good evolutionary reason for this, particularly for if the individuals in question have already passed on their genes. Religion is a convenient excuse to behave like an asshat, but if you take it away then people just find other excuses (national exceptionalism, for example).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Religion doesn't cause war, but is used by people who aren't religious but pretend to be. All wars are for power and wealth, started and waged by sociopaths.
Free Martian Whores!
This should be a day of mourning, not just because of the people who died (one of my managers at the time, Vladimir Tomasevic, I am lucky not to have been there too), but it's a day of mourning for the liberties and freedoms lost across USA but also across the entire freaking world. The entire world today looks more and more like a crazy toon town, with cops with machine guns everywhere, insane laws, TSA, just general loss of privacy, liberty, decency, everything, and this should also include the economic calamity that obviously worsened due to the insane response to the events.
This kind of response is not about fighting crime, which terrorism basically is. This kind of response is about destroying the human rights and freedoms, if that still means anything to anybody.
I wish to see return to normalcy and government non-intervention, so I think voting for Ron Paul is the obvious good first step. If the man understands one thing - it's liberty and the other thing is economy.
Also, WTF, USA? Where are 10 towers in place of those 2, 10 that are 5 times as tall?
You can't handle the truth.
I was in 10th grade German class when we got the announcement. I remember not grasping the significance of the news until I saw the look of fear on my teacher's face. I hopped on the school network to try to get updates. I was moderately successful... most sites were down, CNN was a 50/50 shot, and so much of my news that day came in through reading updates and comments on Slashdot, at least until we were allowed to go to the library (the one place in our school that had cable TV).
I'm fearful that we've squandered quite a bit of the opportunity (not the right word, I know) that the tragedy bought us in the following months and years. Instead of making amends with the world, I fear we've gotten involved in three endless wars and brought our country to the brink of bankruptcy, both fiscally and morally.
As one commenter put it, in perhaps the most chillingly precognitive Slashdot comment of all time: "The biggest casualty will probably be our Constitution. Whenever a tragedy likes this occurs, the government always announces a get tough on terrorists policy that will have no effect on the psychopaths who do this, but will severely limit our rights.
"The huge loss of life is bad enough. The subsequent loss of what truly represents what this country stands for will be intolerable."
I agree it's wrong to blame religion in general for this, But the attacks were religiously motivated.
They were conducted by a religious fanatical group, al-Qaeda.
The stated reasons from al-Qaeda for the attacks were threefold:
1) U.S Support of Israel
This could be religious or non-religious, but for al-Qaeda it was probably a religious reason)
2) U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia
This was definitely a religious motivation. al-Qaeda believs that the Koran forbids a long term presence by non-Muslims so close to Mecca.
3) U.S. / Western sanctions against Iraq.
While al-Qaeda had no love for Saddam Hussein, they still listed this as a reason. I've never heard an explanation for why this is a reason, but I presume it's because they perceived the sanctions as harming Muslims living in Iraq.
So religion played more than a small role in the motivations. These statements were made before the attacks (years before) and after.
That said, as an atheist, I still can't make such a sweeping statement that religion is *always* bad, or that it causes things like this. It can motivate people both ways, like politics and lots of other things.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Agreed.
100,000 civilians died already in that war and you NEVER hear the USA mentioning them. Even though they started that war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
It's always "Thanks to our troops for your service" but the civilians of Iraq are not even acknowledged. I'm not even saying the US should apologize but they never even mention those civilian victims, as if they didn't exist!
Today the USA want the whole world to pity them. Well no, 9/11 was a tragedy but I won't have any sympathy for people who constantly ignore the innocent victims of their war. It's sick.
The responses OP received (and no doubt I will receive) just show how the US are callous, have no respect for foreigners whose lives they destroy, and never, ever admit any wrongdoing whatsoever. You don't want us to spoil your day by talking about people dying in Iraq, do you? Today should be all about America day, right? And those Iraqi civilians they can be mentioned any other day of the year, just like they have been so far, can't they? Oh wait, they have never been mentioned by the USA... Guess today is their day then!
For the rest of the world, 9/11 should be Fuck America Day and it should be so until the USA own up to their responsibilities towards the victims of the Iraq War.
When I was a kid you'd turn the telly on and see another news report about the IRA blowing up a school or setting off a nail bomb in Soho. It happened too often to stop the country though and America didn't give two shits so the rest of the world didn't say anything. You just got on with it. This country's took a lot from terrorist attacks over the years but September 11th was the first proper kick in the teeth for the previously untouchable Americans who're brainwashed from birth to believe they're the greatest country in the world. That was probably a bigger shock than the lives lost - the fact that someone got to them. This really isn't flamebait so don't consider it as such please. Spare a thought for the lives lost in the attacks yes, but do these people ever spare a thought for the lives lost elsewhere. Those places not in the centre of the universe. http://www.amazon.com/Keep-Calm-Carry-T-Shirt-Red/dp/B004IC0WMM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315749737&sr=8-1
who did you want to invade and kill?
Science flies you to the moon, religion flies you into buildings.
The two are not mutually exclusive. It was about foreign policy, yes.
But al-Qaeda (a religious extremist group,first of all) objected to three foreign policy points on religious grounds.
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2422714&cid=37367802
They weren't upset about general foreign policy points like trade policy or environments policy, or monetary policy. They were upset over things that they perceived to violate tenants of Islam.
You can make secular arguments for all three of their main stated reasons. But that isn't the route they took. Their reasons were explicitly religious.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
The main consequence of the attack was that Bush/Cheney invaded Iraq. It's now over 8 years later, and we're still at war in Iraq. No WMD, no Binladen connection, or any of Bush/Cheney's other lies were ever proven anything but lies. Like "the war will pay for itself". The Iraq War has cost us well over $3 TRILLION. It has cost us almost 5000 dead Americans, over 100,000 wounded Americans, and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis. Not to mention the severe costs of Americans torturing so many people.
We'll memorialize 9/11/2001 for a long time. But 3/19/03? What's that? It's the date the US invaded Iraq. Nobody wants to talk about that, so the war never ends.
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make install -not war
The Russians had publicity in the west against them so they pulled out of a war that was nothing but negative press to them.
The US was making that bad press and funding the war against the russians.
The Russians may be laughing their ass of at the mess the US has gotten itself into BUT they are not going to aid the taliban just to piss of the Americans.
The US may not be winning the war but they sure as hell are thinning out the Taliban. There is reason the Taliban is using more and more terror tactics in Afghanistan, they are running out of capable recruits.
What you may not have heard is that just after 9/11 the Taliban fielded a fairly capable army and was using traditional war strategies against the Afghani government. They are no longer capable of it. That is not to say the war has been won but you got to have a LOT of hatred to join up for what is practically a suicide mission. Suicide bombers you say? Count them. They have a horrific impact but are totally incapable of being used in any sensible military tactics. Post 9/11 people feared an uprising, the beginning of a new war... but where is the hatred? Just recently Libyan's were shown kissing the US flag for the aid in helping liberate their country. Oh, the US involvement there is far from clean BUT Osama cried for Muslims around the world to rally to a common cause and for 9 years, the answer was silence. There are plenty of individuals with enough hatred but terrorism is hardly new. IRA, Basks, German radicals. There are always going to be people who want to force their minority opinion through violence.
The western world has payed dearly for the war but the price payed on the side of the extremists is far far higher. Their leadership is in ruins, new plots are half-assed and stopped routinely and worsed off all. When the uprising finally started, it was peaceful and directed against Muslim rulers with so far precious little input from extreme Islam. This is not what Osama was dreaming off.
And those who cry about how the west is fighting itself... metal detectors? They have been at airports for decades. Just because the US allowed internal flights to be boarded from the runway by anybody taking anything they wanted doesn't mean that this is the norm. I was search 30 years ago on a boat trip to the UK for crying out load. Maybe the US just needed a wake-up call in general.
As for hatred against the US? There seems to be more hatred amongst rich white boys from the American suburbs then say in Egypt or Tunisia or Libya. Remember the protests in Iran. The ones happening in Syria? Against the evil imparislists! Oh, wait no... they are protesting against their own leaders, leaders who try to use the US as the great Satan and their people are rejecting it.
No, 9/11 saw big changes in the world but I doubt Osama is very pleased with them... even if he was still alive.
But kiddies like you wish to see the world burn and use their own fears to put hatred into other peoples mind, even if those other people got far more important things to worry about. Read the real news for a change, not Fox or the BBC, both are extremists wishing to color the news to suit their agenda but the real news. What real people living real life are thinking.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's a little more complicated than that. There are those of us in the USA who recognize that our government takes actions on its own behalf, often unbeknownst to most citizens, that cause strife, violence, and suffering. The US citizens are currently under economic assault from the same banking/government cartel which has launched full wars on the citizens of other countries. Some of us try to raise awareness, but as many have found through history, it's much easier to get people to hate than to get them to look at the failure of their own actions (or inactions).
Ron Paul, for example, is a presidential candidate who is largely mocked by the media, but he has explained publicly and repeatedly that US foreign policy creates the very conditions that foster terrorism - by interfering in other sovereign nations' governments, by having belligerent and aggressive foreign policy, and also by exporting our inflation by taking advantage of the dollar's reserve status. There are many, many things we do that are wrong, and most happen simply because the schools, media, and government don't see it profitable to make sure that the average Joe (who is too busy either working or watching TV) understands these issues. But the two big parties and the media have already decided that nationalism is our country's pastime, and anyone who questions it must be mocked. Other nations have had similar, if more heavy-handed, cooperation between government and media to suppress dissent, no?
I, for one, as an American, have made it a priority to educate my fellow citizens on such issues. I recently explained to a coworker why the Egyptians who revolted against our satrap Mubarak were also angry at us (our support of his regime through money, training, and weapons). He was shocked. He's not a bad guy, he's just too busy to take any serious steps to get the CIA/Pentagon under control.
When you consider how easy it is for the powers that be to quash real change in our democracy (again see Ron Paul), it becomes a question of whether the American people, even if they woke up to the evils our government does, could do anything to change it. We're not unique as a nation, whatever people believe.
There is no doubt this was a tragedy and a sad day for the American people but from an outsiders perspective (an Australian perspective) this is what we saw happening to you guys.
Why has no forensic investigation ever been carried out and scrutinised? Why wasn't OBL tried and humiliated, and made to face his worst fear in front of the American public? I strongly feel that Americans have been denied actual justice and have instead been given a serve of McJustice by media/military. The true strength of Western democracies has been that they are countries run BY RULE OF LAW that has been refined over a roughly 800 year period. If we look at it from that perspective the military look like a very blunt tool, by comparison. Yet it was the tool of first resort. What does it say about our democracy that one of the strongest was so easily subverted?
The consequences of not applying those principles have drawn the U.S into an asymmetrical war that has cost trillions, without actually being able to hit a target of any meaning. I believe many forth amendment rights have practically been abandoned, you have a domestic spy policy now and bills introduced to protect the freedoms of everyday people are slowly being whittled down.
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin "The constitution in it's current form will not save the United States from Despotism". The American people have been lied to and deceived, I'm ashamed to say in part, by an Australian Media mogul who learned how to do what he is doing to America in my homeland.
Justice delayed, Just denied.
The war that was being waged on America began when the Towers were hit but the enemy has attacked in such a way that the freedoms that protected US citizens have been hit far more severely than those Towers. The institution of democracy was weakened from within at one of the modern cradles of it's creation and now I see it more compromised than it has ever been. Human rights, the bedrock of your enviable Bill of Rights, the true strength of your nation were treated as an inconvenience to circumvented. Yet it's the only weapon capable of disarming a martyr.
Know your enemy, Know yourself, and whilst the truth must be painful for you to hear will you bludgeon to death the friend who has the courage to look you in the face and tell it to you? The one who says, "hey mate, yer acting like a dickhead". How can you possibly win in Iraq and Afghanistan when the real war is in the cathedrals of your institutions by an enemy who is manipulating you so skillfully that you dance willingly to the tune. Stop, friend, before you destroy yourself and ask who the real enemy is, what the true theater of this war is and what forces are at play?
How many of Ben Franklins warnings will you ignore? Why do I, an Australian, have to point out the wisdom of your own founding fathers whose words have been paraphrased ad infinitum;
Those who trade an essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither security nor liberty
Then why America why, do you keep doing it?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
No we don't.
Yes we are.
No we can't. I run the tech for an energy management equipment/network/software/support company in NYC that cuts energy consumption an average of 20%, mostly in heating oil/gas. The notoriously greedy building owners never pay the upfront costs, even when it pays back in under a year - that's close to 100% ROI, and rising with energy costs. The only way they do it is when there's government money and/or requirements to do it. Until NYC's law kicked in this year, building owners refused to even measure their energy consumption, let alone reduce it. This is the reality, not the "Mayor of Sim City" Ron Paul LARPing Ayn Rand.
The right thing would have been an "Apollo programme" for energy efficiency/alternatives to get our money, and the troops that always follow it, out of the Mideast. By now, a decade later, we could have cut our energy consumption by at least 30%, maybe more, and set trade policies to get all of our oil/gas from our biggest sources: Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean (and some gas from the Pacific). Instead we invaded Iraq, sending oil to $100:bbl for most of a decade, while promoting SUVs and even Hummers that get 1/3 the mileage we should require from cars. We could have interconnected regional and commuter rail, built more cargo and passenger interlinks. The $3 TRILLION we spent in Iraq so far could have bought us an energy, transit and building infrastructure that got the Mideast and much of the global corruption out of our hair permanently. Instead we spent the time, money and lives making things worse.
We don't need to do wild science fiction to solve our core economic/political problems. We need to do straightforward science and engineering. Which should be the easiest politics of all. Instead, we wanted a flight suit, a megaphone, and blood. We sure got it.
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make install -not war
Summarized excerpt from "Al Qeada's Strategy to the Year 2020":
bin Laden's stated goal, before and after the terror attacks in Kenya and on the Cole, was to draw the West into an intractable war with the Middle East. He was an evil fuck, but like some evil fucks in the past, he wasn't crazy or stupid. He got the idea from us in the late 80s when the same policy bankrupted the Soviet Union.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life." --October, 2001
"All we have to do is send two mujaheddin... to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaeda" in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses." --2004
The anniversary of 9/11 always pisses me off. No, not because 3000 people died. 3000 people dying was a tragedy to be sure and the relatives of the victims certainly have my condolences. What pisses me off is the cowardly way that we as Americans reacted and how we continue to behave.
After 9/11 we had a decision. We could either have been brave or cowardly. We chose the path of cowardice. Cowardice is submitting to terror by stripping ourselves of civil liberty, creating a department of "homeland security", and installing pr0n scanners in airports. Cowardice is secret no-fly lists and domestic spying. The worst cowardice was Americans mewing to their politicians to strip them of their liberties to save them from the oh-so-scary terrorist. Cowardice is the path we picked. We gave up essential liberties for a trivial amount of security.
The path of bravery would have been to have by clinging to our essential freedoms and liberties. The nation that stood down the fucking USSR, a REAL threat, managed to go half a century without surrendering their freedoms and running away screaming like cowards. Seriously, consider that. 9/11 stripped away freedoms that we had even when the US was facing down a nation armed with a nuclear arsenal big enough to wipe out the world multiple times over. We faced down a world ending threat and didn't balk, but when a couple of sheep herders managed to knock down two buildings in a manner that they can never repeat again, we promptly shit ourselves and surrender those liberties we guarded when facing down the existential threat that was the USSR. Talking about acting the part of the fucking coward. If there was ever a time to piss ourselves and wipe our ass with the constitution, it was during the Cold War.
Just think about it for a moment. In a time when it was our policy the literally destroy the world if our allies were attacked, you could get on an airplane unmolested and the fourth amendment was still actively enforced.
If you are an American, you are going to die by stuffing your face with too much fucking food. Fucking deal with it. You are not going to die in a terrorist attack. The food you stuff into your god damn face is going to be the death of you. That, or your own body is going to murder you with cancer. If you are really lucky, you might die in an exciting car accident. The fucking terrorist are not going to kill you. If you believe so, you are a god damn coward and an idiot.
Look here: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm
Fucking food bacteria kills 10x more people every year than terrorist did in 2001. It kills 300x more people than terrorist have killed Americans in the past decade. Terrorism in 2001 didn't even make it to the top 10 most likely ways to die. It falls well below chocking on your own god damn food over the past decade. That is right, stuffing food into your fat face is literally more likely to kill you than a terrorist.
So what pisses me off about 9/11 is that it is not a time for memorials and what not. What pisses me off is that we sit around circle jerking each other over how scary the terrorist are as we stuff our fat Americans asses with McDonalds food. We mew and bleat to politicians to protect us from one of the most unlikely ways to die imaginable, as we work on scoring a heart attack before the age of 60 by eating ourselves to death.
We could have a 9/11 style attack every single MONTH, and we would still have more people dying to being fat asses. Despite this, I don't see us cowardly begging the government to strip us of our civil liberties to save us from eating ourselves to death.
9/11 pisses me off each and every year because it is a sore reminder that when faced with a minor and petty threat to ourselves, we shit our pants, pissed ourselves, and picked the path of the coward. We gave up our civil liberties and elected asshole politicians who promised to rip apart the constitution. It pains me to think
The best writing I've seen on 9/11 was by Hunter S. Thompson. Hunter knew how the US government worked, and foresaw just about everything that has happened since right from the start:
I was once attacked by a dog. Since then I have carried around a solid gold tiger. It has made me the object of ridicule, my limbs are aching and I can barely afford to eat. But at least I haven't been attacked by any more dogs.
God bless your betters!
Not True. The number of deaths from drunken driving has been steadily reducing for many years. What we've done about it has been very effective. We've treated it as if it were a crime.
How effective do you all suppose it would have been to have declared "WAR" on drunk driving? My guess is that we'd have spent our treasury dry and had to borrow money from China. Probably would have ruined our economy. Sure glad that didn't happen.
It seems if we accept that 9/11 occurs every day in Iraq, then we must also accept that 9/11 happens every day in Libya. So, fuck those terrorist countries too for causing civilian deaths in a war zone.
Let's see... fuck Denmark, fuck Italy, fuck Netherlands, fuck Norway, fuck Sweden, fuck Spain, fuck Turkey, fuck Jordan, fuck Qatar, fuck UAE. Fuck them all.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Shinto, not Buddhism. They literally worshiped the Emperor, and you can't draw a clear distinction between religion and patriotism in their case.
It's shameful that the media coverage is merely a flashback back to 9/11, and I here nothing about the subsequent fear, paranoia, and loss of freedoms that have engulfed the country. It was certainly a horrible day, but the aftermath on our country has been tens of thousands of times worse.
We got into two wars that we're STILL it., We have this lovely patriot act, which continues to be renewed with little debate. We have a continually fearful public, cowed into submission to The Official Reaction. We have ever increasing security theatre at airports. But yet no coverage of any of that. It's all about the day, and nothing about the disaster afterward.
AccountKiller
The trucker union, the Teamsters, has some power, but it's not even enough to protect their pensions - let alone force the US to choose roads and airports over rails. The power is in the vehicle makers: car and truck makers, airplane makers. And of course the oil corps. Those corporations have been calling the shots since Henry Ford, and are the ones who tore up America's rail to replace with roads and cars. Those are the orgs that set up Houston, Oil City, the way you hate - not the unions.
You can tell me about how your family oil business knows there's so much oil left to drill, yet despite getting royalty-free drilling land practically wherever they ask, their industry doesn't drill. Except maybe when getting Federal money from the rest of us to multiply their profits. The actual unlimited supply is self-serving lies about where oil is or isn't coming from oil companies with agendas to maximize profit by increasing demand and decreasing supply. I know they're your family, but if they're like mine or any other family I know, they'll tell you the same lies they tell themselves that protect what they do that they know is wrong.
I can tell you from direct experience that NYC building owners don't invest in their operating capital even when the ROI is, as I told you, close to 100% or better, except when the government both forces them and pays them to do it. It doesn't make sense. But that's because economics is not like electronics, where consistency and actual value rule the actors. Economics is a measure of people's exchanges of value with each other and their environment. Which means it's governed by human social psychology, not primarily by the potential and limits of the material being exchanged. Despite their deserved reputation of being the worlds most determined capitalists, NYC building owners refuse to make rational investment decisions all the time. It's not because of property/zoning laws/regulations. It's because they are used to increasing profits only by cutting immediate costs (like cheaper maintenance workers) or by reducing the supply of real estate against the constantly increasing demand for it. Purely rational people would change despite what they're used to when there's double or triple digit ROIs from investing in necessary costs they have to pay anyway (boiler upgrades and fuel). Building owners don't change, because they wait for everyone around them to change, or to be forced to change, or to be paid to change - or all of them usually.
Again, this is not some kind of guess at what might happen. Also, your statement that the rich in NYC are taxed so much that they flee to other states is just a lie. Except for the extremely rich who move across the state line to Connecticut. It's not that they're taxed so much in NYC, but that they're taxed so little in CT. So when rivers overflow in predictable storms, they're surrounded by a moat their private airlifts have to get across with food and diesel for their generators. Because without taxes and working government their infrastructure, like roads, powerlines and drainage, can't withstand the changes their businesses are making. They are the tiny minority. NYC is full of the richest people in the world, not despite the taxation but because of the services it pays for. And every day more rich people come here, to pay the taxes and consume the services.
FYI, NASA is not a good example to contest government leading energy efficiency, because building efficiency is not rocket science. NASA as run by either a Republican president or Congress or both for the past couple of generations is like any other large government procurement system: corporate welfare for those who sell by the part# through their DC lobbyists. NYC law, like practically all energy efficiency regulations these days, requires only performance standards and energy improvement results (or just standardized reporting in physical units).
I'm always fascinated by the people whose entire career
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make install -not war
Your understanding of certain critical elements is flawed.
We didn't invade Iraq unprovoked (the first time). If you're referring to the second time, yes, that invasion was unprovoked, but that occurred years after 9/11, so it couldn't have been a motive.
In fact, when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, we had the entire world on our side. We were virtually unopposed in the campaign to grow a coalition within the U.N.
Also, what fewer people realize: Bin Laden offered his help to Saudi Arabia at the time.
Bin Laden didn't want Infidels in the Kingdom. He realized a war against Iraq to liberate Kuwait and defend Saudi Arabia would have to be based out of Saudi Arabia. So he asked the Saudi royals to let his forces defend the Kingdom rather than allowing foreigners onto holy ground.
The Saudi royalty, seeing the Kuwaiti royalty now living in the Saudi royalty's hotels after narrowly escaping from Kuwait, decided that perhaps they'd rather have real armies to defend them instead of a group of poorly armed rebel freedom fighters.
Wise choice or not, it pissed off Bin Laden. He used to be close with the Saudi royal family, and apparently this created a permanent rift between him and the royals. That Infidels would be stationed on holy land was insult to injury to him. That they would stay after Kuwait was liberated was intolerable.
Why Bin Laden never chose to strike Israel directly, I can't say. But their motives were most definitely religious. Political too to be sure, but unquestionably religious.
Again, it wasn't target selection that was religiously motivated. It was the motives of the war to begin with.
We went to war with Japan because they bombed Pearl Harbor. We didn't only attack targets that were related to Pearl Harbor. That's not how war works.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Since oil is priced in dollars, when we increase the money supply the whole world feels it. When we sell sovereign debt the same thing happens. China has been importing our inflationary effects for decades to support their export based economy. Arab nations the same with oil. When the portion of your income which goes to food and energy is 30% like in the USA and food and energy prices rise by 20% you feel a pinch. But to the people in Arab nations whose food and energy costs 80% of their income, when those prices rise by 20% they get wiped out. Hence the "arab Spring" (among other drivers). There's a lot more to it that can be better explained by smarter people than me at Mises.org.
I should note that every that I applied to Ron Paul above should be equally applied to Denis Kucinich, who is very liberal but shares many of the foreign policy views of Dr. Paul and was also suppressed by his own political party for not being nationalistic enough.
Terrorism as practiced by groups like Al Qaida is much different. Al Qaida is a military organization with a global reach that has essentially declared war on the United States (as well as dozens of others governments, it seems). One of the core responsibilities of government is to defend its citizenry against military threats. But terrorists don't stop at attacking our military installations; by definition, they aim to kill thousands of civilians at a time as part of a campaign of psychological warfare. To say that we don't need a DHS, greatly increased security at airports and subway stations, etc. is ridiculous. Al Qaida would love it if we went back to our pre-9/11 levels of security (which was mostly aimed at common criminals). They would continue with their 9/11 style attacks on airplanes, the shoe bombing attacks that Richard Reid blew the cover on later, the London subway bombings, the Mumbai hotel massacre, etc, with the goal of getting Americans to believe that government was incapable of protecting them. Like a schoolyard bully, they will continue until they are effectively confronted and stopped.
Americans poured out their blood and tears over the past 200+ years to gain essential freedoms and liberties. Ripping up the fourth and fifth amendment because a bunch of sheep herders can on rare occasion kill a few Americans is pure cowardice. We don't respond violently to each and every little trivial threat, and terrorist fall firmly in the 'trivial threat' category. For the same reason why I would HOPE that Americans would be against random warrantless searches of their homes in attempt to capture more normal criminals, I would hope that they can get a handle on their mewing cowardly fright of an extremely rare way to die, and respond in the same way when confront with terrorism.
There are lots of things we could do to marginally increase our safety. We don't do most of them because it isn't worth the cost. A brutal Soviet style police state has less violent crime. We reject that sort of police state because we are willing to tolerate a little more crime in exchange for liberty. Our courts are biased to let guilty people go free because we don't want to jail innocent people. Terrorism is not magically different. Sure, it is the responsibility of the government to make reasonable efforts to stop terrorist. It sure as shit isn't their responsibility to do it at any cost. The amount we pay in terms of money and liberty to defend against terrorism needs to be balanced by the fact that it is an absurdly rare way for anyone to actually die.
The US has a 200+ year history of bleeding to grow and defend its liberties. We faced down the Soviet Union with one hand tied behind our back in terms of counter espionage because we were so insistent about preserving the liberties that we were fighting for. It is sad and pathetic that when faced with fucking sheep herders that are a couple of centuries behind what the USSR was in terms of population, resources, and technological capability, we promptly shit ourselves and couldn't surrender our liberties against a trivial threat fast enough.
If you want to be a coward, fearful of death due to the absurdly rare chance of being struck down by a terrorist (rather than eating yourself to death), do it quietly. Don't mew and bleat for politicians to piss away MY money and liberty because you can't control your bowels. I appreciate the blood and sacrifices that Americans have made over the past 200+ years to grow and defend their liberty. I don't appreciate sniveling cowards rushing to surrender away what other far more deserving men and women have built.
It is not asking much that you honor the blood and sacrifices made by better and braver men and women than you by making your own tiny and nearly effortless sacrifice of not pissing yourself and bleating to politicians to save you on the rare occasion that a terrorist manages to kill a trivial and minuscule portion of the population. If previous Americans co
you got it twisted son. the war against 9/11 was not iraq. its afghanistan. as a current service member, i absolutely abhor what happened iraq. that was not our fight to begin with and never was. but afghanistan absolutely was the fight for 9/11 and continues to be. as long as those in the middle east continue to wish death against those of us in ANY western nation, then i will continue to fight, till death does me part. for it is not only the sovereignty for our nations, but the right for us to leave in peace without fearing a terrorist attack that i will continue to fight against those that wish harm upon my friends, family, and brethren.
Today the USA want the whole world to pity them.
No we don't. This is a day of national remembrance. We don't want your pity and didn't ask for it.
afghanistan absolutely was the fight for 9/11 and continues to be.
How so? Afghanistan was invaded because talibs refused to unconditionally hand over Osama, but they themselves didn't play any significant part in 9/11. So eventually they've got Osama in Pakistan - what's Aghanistan about, now?
Also, let's see what the track record of U.S/NATO there has been so far:
1. Replaced autocratic theocracy with sham democratic theocracy. Beheading for apostasy and stoning to death for adultery are still the law in "liberated" Afghanistan.
2. Taliban-controlled areas, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, became the breeding ground for terrorists. Now that they are attacked by the U.S., it's a good and easy way to be "martyred" for those looking for it.
3. Poppy production is through the roof again, and floods Russia and Europe. Taliban used to burn the fields and kill the growers; the new government almost entirely consists of those people who cash in on selling drugs.