This is the saddest anniversary of that date in the twenty years since the event itself. Saddest by far, and angriest as well.
I don’t really have to explain in any detail why I say that; I’ve already written a great deal about how the actions of the administration in the last month or so have not only undone any progress we had made against the forces that perpetrated and/or celebrated 9/11, but in my opinion have taken us to an even worse state than before.
That undoing – that unraveling – was performed for no pressing reason other than whatever goes on in Joe Biden’s mind and the minds of those who advise and to a certain extent control him. The left has its reasons for doing what it does, of that you can be sure, and they do not include wishing America well.
All of that makes what otherwise would have been a solemn and sobering occasion an exponentially more tragic and enraging one.
There are so many documentary videos on the original 9/11 that I find it hard to choose what to highlight today. This one, however, is very short but very searing. It encapsulates the horror and pathos of the day. The ending of the video is a reminder of a resolve that is still there for many of us but certainly not for all of us, and not for the people who are currently in positions of power in the White House. Why did I merely link to it and not embed it? It is just too heartbreaking, and using a link gives it the tiniest bit of extra distance. I warn you that, short though it may be, it is difficult to watch.
Here’s another short one that focuses on a recent interview with some of the now-grownup children who lost a parent that day. It highlights the passage of time.
Twenty years. Sometimes it seems like a lot more than that, doesn’t it?
I’m just going to link to it rather than embedding it. I don’t want his face to appear on my blog today. If you decide to follow the link you may notice – as I did very late last night – that the comments are uniformly bitter and derisive.
Here’s a sampler:
Like the soft caress of a cold dead fish, Biden ‘soothes’ the nation with a pre-recorded, heavily edited statement that would not even get an honorable mention for public speaking at the local retirement home.
Cmon man that was 20 years ago “checks watch”.
I watched this at night…. now I can’t sleep, he just looks so creepy.
This traitor gave a nation to the terrorist who did these attacks.
Disgusting to hear him talk about the victims.
Vacant stare in those dead black eyes. What’s up, Joe.
The man invented Borking which led to the politics of personal destruction. He’s a used car salesman with a law degree.
He looks like he just woke up out of his casket. We have never had a weaker person as a president.
He preaches the very opposite of everything he does. While he sows division in everything he does, he preaches unity. What a joke you keep talking about unity joe.
These are typical. Plus, there are a great many that mention his leaving behind Americans in Afghanistan. There’s a great deal of anger out there, and his supporters – wherever they are and whoever they are – are almost entirely silent. It’s probably because they are not actually pro-Joe but anti-Trump and anti the right.
I have yet to speak to any of my Democrat friends on the topic of what’s been going on in the last few weeks, except to refer to it in the general sense as very upsetting, a sentiment with which they agree. I sense they do not want to talk about it or hear from me on it, but at some point my plan is to choose one or two friends whom I usually can talk to about politics without their getting angry (although they sometimes get impatient), and talk to them in more depth about these things.
I have no idea whether they are getting at all regretful about their votes for Biden, or whether they are still very pleased he won. My guess is the latter.
Even when the Biden administration is trying to seem tough on terrorists they can’t quite pull it off with competence. I’m actually surprised that the left is reporting this story:
The U.S. drone strike that military officials said targeted a suspected ISIS-K car bomb in Kabul during the final days of the U.S. evacuation effort may have mistakenly targeted an innocent civilian, according to extensive investigations by the New York Times and Washington Post. Ten civilians, including seven children, were reportedly killed in the August 29 airstrike. All were members of the same extended family.
…On August 29, U.S. Central Command announced that it had conducted a drone strike on a suspected terrorist driving a car that seemed to be filled with explosives and was believed to pose an imminent threat to the airport. Military officials suggested that the driver, whom they were not able to identify, had acted suspiciously in the hours before the strike, including a stop at a possible ISIS-K safe house, and loading the car with heavy packages that may have been explosives. The U.S. said that a larger secondary explosion occurred after the drone strike, which would suggest the presence of explosive cargo and seemingly justified targeting the vehicle.
But the Times investigation found no evidence of a large secondary blast, and the Post’s investigation suggests that if a second blast was seen, the most likely explanation would be that it was from the ignition of the vehicle’s fuel…
Both publications have identified the driver as Zemari Ahmadi, a 43-year-old electrical engineer who had long worked for Nutrition and Education International, a California-based aid organization operating in Afghanistan. According to relatives who spoke with the Times, Ahmadi and another member of his extended family in Afghanistan who had once worked as a U.S. military contractor had both applied for refugee resettlement in the U.S. for them and their families.
According to Ahmadi’s family members and colleagues, the white sedan he drove belonged to NEI, and his various stops on the 29th were just a normal day on the job, including picking up his boss’s laptop and transporting co-workers…
…[P]er the Times report, “according to his relatives, as Mr. Ahmadi pulled into his courtyard, several of his children and his brothers’ children came out, excited to see him, and sat in the car as he backed it inside.”
What a nightmare this administration is. They sent a drone to kill someone based on evidence that flimsy? They were apparently desperate to appear tough.
Again, I wonder why the left is reporting this. I can speculate – for example, is it a sign that Biden is going to be removed? But I really have no idea.
Commenter “Cornhead” has written this piece on the funeral procession for 23-year old Marine Cpl. Daegan Page of Omaha, killed in the Kabul airport terrorist attack. RIP.
The President and I are unequivocal in our support of Roe v. Wade and the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade, and the right of women to make decisions for themselves with whomever they choose — about their own bodies. And, needless to say, the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is not negotiable. The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is their decision; it is their body.
Interesting that she doesn’t say “birthing people.” But in addition to that, note she only states that women have that right, not people in general.
More:
And no legislative institutions have the right to circumvent the Constitution of the United States in an attempt to interfere with, much less to prevent, a woman to make those decisions.
Harris is a lawyer. Her words are carefully chosen: no legislative institutions. She goes on to specifically cite the Texas legislature as a big offender (as well as other states seeking to limit abortions) to her stated principle. Does Harris think the chief executive – that is, President Biden – has the right to limit the body freedom and decisions of individuals concerning COVID and vaccinations? Don’t be silly; of course she does.
More:
So we will have a conversation about how what is happening in Texas is affect- — affecting women in Texas. But, as we know, it’s not only Texas where this is happening. And I know we’re going to talk about Mississippi. We’re talking about New Mexico. We’re going to talk about the United States and what we must do collectively — all of us — to protect the women of our country and protect their constitutional rights.
You get the idea: we’re going to stop those state legislatures – you know, the ones that reflect the will of the people – from limiting our power to limit their power. And again, it’s about women’s rights, not rights for all people. Oh, and constitutional rights? The main problem with Roe is that it invented a constitutional right where none existed, and even many of those who like the results of the decision have admitted it rests on very shaky constitutional grounds.
Harris continues to rail against states that have limitations on abortion, and mentions that health care is a universal right (something she did not say about bodily integrity and autonomy, which she limited very carefully to women). It’s only at the very end that she adds the following:
When people are able to design their lives in a way that they can determine their own futures, we are a stronger democracy and we are a stronger nation. When people are able to make choices without government interference for themselves — in terms of their wellbeing and the wellbeing of their family, in consultation with whomever they may choose — we are a stronger society.
That’s the only time Harris mentions people in general, and note that she adds the following: “in terms of their wellbeing and the wellbeing of their family.” That limitation is in there for a reason, I think, which is that it would allow her to say, if asked, that vaccination refusal negatively impacts not just on the self and that person’s family but on others as well. Of course, so does abortion – in particular, it impacts on the man who impregnated the woman and who may want the child but has no say in the matter, and of course it impacts on the child.
The child? What child? One of the things that has always struck me about this “my body, my choice” thing is that it clearly involves the life of at least one other person by terminating it. One can even be in favor of abortion and recognize that as a troubling fact that needs discussing rather than denying. But abortion advocates such as Harris would rather pretend it doesn’t even exist. That is really the heart – and the heartbeat – of the matter, isn’t it?
The quickest and most guaranteed way to save hundreds of thousands of lives with policy changes would be to ban the use of automobiles, or severely restrict their usage to those authorized by the state on the ground of essential need (e.g., ambulances or food-delivery vehicles), or at least lower the nationwide speed limit to 25 mph. Any of those policies would immediately prevent huge numbers of human beings from dying. Each year, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), “1.35 million people are killed on roadways around the world,” while “crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States for people aged 1–54.”…
Given how many deaths and serious injuries would be prevented, why is nobody clamoring for a ban on cars, or at least severe restrictions on who can drive (essential purposes only) or how fast (25 mph)? Is it because most people are just sociopaths who do not care about the huge number of lives lost by the driving policies they support, and are perfectly happy to watch people die or be permanently maimed as long as their convenience is not impeded? Is it because they do not assign value to the lives of other people, and therefore knowingly support policies — allowing anyone above 15 years old to drive, at high speeds — that will kill many children along with adults?
…It is because we employ a rational framework of cost-benefit analysis, whereby, when making public policy choices, we do not examine only one side of the ledger (number of people who will die if cars are permitted) but also consider the immense costs generated by policies that would prevent those deaths (massive limits on our ability to travel, vastly increased times to get from one place to another, restrictions on what we can experience in our lives, enormous financial costs from returning to the pre-automobile days)…
We never opt for a society-altering policy on the ground that “any lives saved make it imperative to embrace” precisely because such a primitive mindset ignores all the countervailing costs…
…[T]he use of cost-benefit analysis as the primary formula we use is uncontroversial — at least it was until the COVID pandemic began. It is now extremely common in Western democracies for large factions of citizens to demand that any measures undertaken to prevent COVID deaths are vital, regardless of the costs imposed by those policies…
Whatever is true about motives, what is unacceptable — sociopathic, really — is the insistence on assigning severe costs to just one side of the ledger (harms from COVID itself) while categorically refusing to recognize let alone value the costs on the other side of the ledger (from severe, enduring anti-COVID disruptions to and restrictions on life).
Greenwald doesn’t get into why this is happening. And I don’t know why either. But I do observe the following: (1) It is not just a US phenomenon, it appears to be widespread in western countries and in some non-Western countries as well (2) It serves the purposes of the left in that it gives them more power and more excuses for that power, as well as accustoming the population to greater levels of government control (3) It serves the purposes of the media for attracting viewers through escalating fear; and (4) It takes advantage of widespread ignorance of math and statistics.
What’s more, in psychological terms, we tend to accept the risks of things to which we’ve become accustomed. COVID is new and although pandemics themselves aren’t new, this one had a very dramatic beginning and frightened people right off the bat (as it were). The unknowns were heightened, and once people became so frightened, COVID became a huge fear for a lot of people and that fear has remained.
Fear tends to be irrational, so cost-benefit analyses don’t often convince in such situations. If cooler heads don’t prevail – and they certainly haven’t with COVID, for the most part – and drum the cost-benefit information into people’s heads with constant repetition, many people will tend to go with their fears. Instead of damping those fears down, government has purposely escalated them.
[NOTE: One of my very first posts about COVID, published March 14, 2020, was called “Gone are the days: assuming the risk.” Right from the start with COVID, I was puzzled by the lack of cost/benefit analysis and historical perspective.]
I’ve already said a few things earlier today. But I’ll reiterate that this COVID mandate business is being done in order to change the subject from the horror show in Afghanistan to a topic that Biden and his aides think is his strong suit.
I wonder if they are miscalculating once again. It really depends on how many Americans remain interested in liberty. I truly don’t know the answer, but that is the question.
Americans seem appallingly willing to sign away their rights–and worse, other people’s rights–for the sake of “public health.”…
What is still not clear to me is why I, having been vaccinated long ago, should care whether others choose to do the same. If the vaccine works, I have nothing to fear from them. If it doesn’t work, they shouldn’t be forced to submit to it.
Increasingly, it appears that the rationale for vaccination is that you still may catch covid, but your infection won’t be as severe as it might otherwise be. Fine: but for people under 60, covid infections are rarely severe in the first place. Young people who think they have little to fear from covid whether they are vaccinated or not are, in general, right. So the government should not try to dictate their health care decisions. Their bodies, their choice.
…The lawsuits will begin to fly as soon as the starting gun goes off.
A friend emailed me to say Jesse Waters had made a good point on the Fox five o’clock show: Biden is not just attempting to boost his own popularity by demonizing a minority — a “distinct” minority, he said twice, with hissing distaste, as if it were a racial slur — but is setting up an excuse for why the economy is tanking under him.
When the economy continues to tank, and inflation continues to soar, Biden will just blame the unvaccinated.
I’d go further and say This is the entire reason for this unconstitutional power-grab. He knows he faces an increasingly likely wipe-out in 2022: He must do something, then, to change the trajectory.
If he can’t fix the economy, he’ll fix blame…
So divide, divide the country. Attempt to demonize a “distinct” minority to become the hate-objects and scapegoats for a transitory majority, keeping them together through shared, stoked hatred just long enough to get through 2022.
This is fascism.
Direct all of the country’s anger towards a “distinct” minority. Blame the Jews. Wait, I mean blame the unvaccinated, who are the subversive wreckers undermining society with their clannish, inscrutable ways.
A lot of those unvaccinated are black, of course. But Biden is counting on black loyalty to the Democrat Party to be absolute.
Two things come to mind. The first is Sarah Conly – remember her? Conly is the Bowdoin professor who wrote the 2013 book Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism, in favor of more government control to ostensibly promote better health. I wrote about her and her book quite a few times – for example, here and here.
And of course, there’s always that evergreen work by the genius known as Dostoevsky. I’m speaking of Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” part of the book The Brothers Karamazov.
In the following passage the Grand Inquisitor is addressing Jesus, who has come back to earth. Although the Inquisitor is a man of the Church, he is not in favor of what he believes Jesus offers to humankind, which is free will. Instead, the Inquisitor proposes to enslave people, and he tells Jesus how he will go about doing it. The Inquisitor speaks here of food, but I think what he says applies just as well to the current situation:
Command that these stones be made bread–and mankind will run after Thee, obedient and grateful like a herd of cattle. But even then it will be ever diffident and trembling, lest Thou should take away Thy hand, and they lose thereby their bread! Thou didst refuse to accept the offer for fear of depriving men of their free choice; for where is there freedom of choice where men are bribed with bread? Man shall not live by bread alone– was Thine answer. Thou knewest not, it seems, that it was precisely in the name of that earthly bread that the terrestrial spirit would one day rise against, struggle with, and finally conquer Thee…
Knowest Thou not that, but a few centuries hence, and the whole of mankind will have proclaimed in its wisdom and through its mouthpiece, Science, that there is no more crime, hence no more sin on earth, but only hungry people? “Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!” will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee–a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel…
…It is then that we will finish building their tower for them. For they alone who feed them shall finish it, and we shall feed them in Thy name, and lying to them that it is in that name. Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: “Enslave, but feed us!” That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth? And even supposing that thousands and tens of thousands follow Thee in the name of, and for the sake of, Thy heavenly bread, what will become of the millions and hundreds of millions of human beings too weak to scorn the earthly for the sake of Thy heavenly bread?…In our sight and for our purpose the weak and the lowly are the more dear to us. True, they are vicious and rebellious, but we will force them into obedience, and it is they who will admire us the most. They will regard us as gods, and feel grateful to those who have consented to lead the masses and bear their burden of freedom by ruling over them–so terrible will that freedom at last appear to men!
The COVID scare and the COVID vaccine mandates aren’t about food, but they are about the same thing: liberty versus government control “for your own good.” And, just as the Inquisitor said, there are all too many people willing to lay down their liberty – or, as Conly says, their autonomy – for what they perceive to be protection from risk.
ADDENDUM: In his speech, Biden says, “This is not about freedom or personal choice.” And of course he’s right. It’s about lack of freedom (actually, liberty) and personal choice.
Take a look at the comments to the video I just linked above.
The only reason I’m writing about Jimmy Kimmel is that some people apparently see him as some sort of thoughtful person worth listening to, and in many ways he’s expressing views that have become all too typical.
“Dr. Fauci said if hospitals get any more overcrowded they’re going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU bed,” the host continued. “That choice doesn’t seem so tough to me. ‘Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.’”
Is this what passes for humor these days? Or is it supposed to be cutting edge thought? Not to mention the fact that ivermectin – the medicine he calls “horse goo” – has been used in humans for years as an anti-parasite medication.
It’s the same Jimmy Kimmel who back in 2017 was passionately advocating that health care should be a basic right for all, regardless of ability to pay. What a difference a few years makes. I guess it’s all right to discriminate if it’s based on vaccination status. The unvaccinated have become the new lepers.
Speaking of which – we have employment mandates on the horizon, courtesy of our fearless leader Joe Biden:
When asked whether the Department of Labor or another entity could force vaccine mandates not just on private companies with federal contracts, but major employers without federal contracts, Psaki responded with a resounding “Yes.” She then told the reporter to “stay tuned” for Biden’s speech today where he will lay out the coming action.
The expansive rules mandate that all employers with more than 100 workers require them to be vaccinated or test for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid also will have to be fully vaccinated.
Biden is also signing an executive order to require vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government – with no option to test out. That covers several million more workers.
The article continues for quite some time, describing the plans, without discussing whether a president has the power to do this and whether there will be legal challenges.
Needless to say, I’m against it. Personally, I’m fully vaccinated, but I defend the right of anyone to refuse vaccination for any reason and am against federal mandates regarding what businesses should require of employees concerning vaccination for COVID. This is extreme coercion, to threaten the livelihood of the unvaccinated (and, by the way, POC – that is, people of color – tend to be disproportionately represented among them).
I also have come to distrust the figures for people dying of COVID, because I know that anyone who has COVID and who dies is often counted as a COVID death whether COVID was actually the cause of death or not. At any rate, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that Biden and company would want to “circle back” to their happy place, which is talking about the dangers of COVID and issuing all sorts of liberty-quashing directives about it. He knows and they know that this is the area of his highest approval from Americans – which is another depressing fact.
Biden’s speech is supposed to start at 5 PM, which is now.
