Day: September 11, 2017

Closing Thought–11Sep17

There have been two horrific attacks on American soil…..Pear Harbor and 9/11……

Sixteen anniversaries of 9/11 have now come. Sixteen. For many reasons, mostly obvious, we place the attacks of that day in a category with Pearl Harbor: both were national tragedies, both inflicted unprecedented death tolls on American soil, both were criticized as intelligence failures, and both launched America into war. Of course, for most Americans, December 7 passes each year with maybe a general awareness, perhaps a moment of acknowledgement when FDR’s words—“a day that will live in infamy”—work their way into our consciousness.

But on each anniversary of 9/11, a host of TV networks still show documentaries about the attacks and their aftermath. It is still occasion for a multitude of think pieces to emerge into the sunlight—some new and important, others less so. Of course, sixteen anniversaries are a lot fewer than seventy-five. Yet, it’s hard not to wonder whether on December 7, 1957, the sixteen-year anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks was marked as prominently as that of 9/11 is today. I don’t expect that it was.

Source: Understanding 9/11 and the Terrorist Threat Today | RealClearDefense

That’s it for me…..I shall return tomorrow with more and better stuff….chuq

Sixteen Years After 9/11, How Does Terrorism End?

Sixteen and counting…….it was a Tuesday morn about 10 when the world change in a matter of moments.

War was declared and we have been fighting ever since.

AS we look back on that fateful day…..there is a question the lurks deep in the mind……will this ever end?

The current spasm of international terrorism, an age-old tactic of warfare, is often traced to a bomb mailed from New York by the anti-Castro group El Poder Cubano, or Cuban Power, that exploded in a Havana post office, on January 9, 1968. Five people were seriously injured. Since then, almost four hundred thousand people have died in terrorist attacks worldwide, on airplanes and trains, in shopping malls, schools, embassies, cinemas, apartment blocks, government offices, and businesses, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. The deadliest remains the 9/11 attack, sixteen years ago this week, which killed almost three thousand people—and in turn triggered a war that has become America’s longest.

I’ve covered dozens of these terrorist attacks on four continents over that half century. After the Barcelona attack and the U.S. decision to send more troops to fight the Taliban, I began to wonder how terrorism ends—or how militant groups evolve. In her landmark study of more than four hundred and fifty terrorist groups, Audrey Kurth Cronin found that the average life span of an extremist movement is about eight years. Cuban Power c

Source: Sixteen Years After 9/11, How Does Terrorism End? | The New Yorker

Take a few moments and say a silent prayer for the families that have been effected by this horrendous act.

9/11 Anniversary–2017

Today we recognize that 16 years ago a handful of whacked out turds flew planes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania….the worse case of terrorism to ever hit the shores of America.

This is an op-ed written for the Washington Times……a look at what has become of the society since that fateful day…..(I do not totally agree with some of their assumptions but a pretty good piece all around)…….

The approach of an anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 always concentrates my mind. It was, astonishingly, 16 Septembers ago that a team of foreign terrorists hijacked three American passenger planes and used them as weapons of mass destruction. Can anyone forget the images of people leaping to their deaths to avoid being consumed by fire and smoke, the twin towers collapsing, the ashes rising, children struggling to come to terms with the fact that they’d never see their mothers and fathers again?

Actually, some people can. The tiki-torch Nazis and the black-shirted anarcho-communist Antifa have moved on. What excites them and, frankly, too many others, is pitting Americans against Americans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender — whatever. As though we hadn’t an enemy in the world.

Source: 9/11 anniversary shows some things remain the same – Washington Times

Take a moment to remember those that gave their lives on that day and pray for their families…..

Reign Of Terror

Last month, July, the French celebrated their Bastille Day, their equivalent to our Independence Day.  They threw off the yoke of the monarchy and set about forming a republic.

After their storming of the Bastille there is little knowledge of what followed….few know of the Reign of Terror but few understand what it was or who was the leader….

I can help with that…..Robespierre was his name and terror was his game.

Maximilien Robespierre has always provoked strong feelings. For the English he is the ‘sea-green incorruptible’ portrayed by Carlyle, the repellent figure at the head of the Revolution, who sent thousands of people to their death under the guillotine. The French, for the most part, dislike his memory still more. There is no national monument to him, though many of the revolutionaries have had statues raised to them. Robespierre is still considered beyond the pale; only one rather shabby metro station in a poorer suburb of Paris bears his name.

Although Robespierre, like most of the revolutionaries, was a bourgeois, he identified with the cause of the urban workers, the sans-culottes as they came to be known, and became a spokesman for them. It is for this reason that he came to dominate the Revolution in its most radical phase. This was the period of the Jacobin government, which lasted from June 1793 to Robespierre’s overthrow in July 1794; the months when the common people became briefly the masters of the first French republic, which had been proclaimed in September 1792. It is also known, more ominously, as the Terror.

Source: Robespierre and the Terror | History Today

There is always more to the story than we know…..I try to help with that oversight.

Class dismissed!

“In God We Trust”

Yes, it is that time again…..a short history lesson for my readers.

For sometime now there has been a debate on the religious aspects of our Constitution and such…..there are those that say that we are a Christian country…..while others say that we are suppose to be a secular government…..

So I thought I would look into the “In God We Trust” slogan that appears all around the government…..

The motto IN GOD WE TRUST was placed on United States coins largely because of the increased religious sentiment existing during the Civil War. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase received many appeals from devout persons throughout the country, urging that the United States recognize the Deity on United States coins. From Treasury Department records, it appears that the first such appeal came in a letter dated November 13, 1861. It was written to Secretary Chase by Rev. M. R. Watkinson, Minister of the Gospel from Ridleyville, Pennsylvania, and read:

Source: History of ‘In God We Trust’

So the slogan appeared almost 100 years after the founding of this country….and it was envisioned during those dark days of the Civil War when all future seemed bleak.