Joe.My.God’s account of “That Day.”
Ian William’s memories of 9/11: “no one wept except the willow”
3 Quarks Daily’s contributors all write about “Five Years Later.”
I’m so glad to read personal accounts because that was what struck me about the media coverage from that day — and for about a week or so after — the grand hype machine had stopped, and all we heard about were real people. No politicians, no celebrities, no pundits, just news anchors talking to and about real human beings living and dying in the real world. I’d much rather hear what New York residents have to say about September 11th than politicians who were in hiding, running like little girls away from the danger.
article on the Washington Post:
“They can’t beat us in a stand-up fight — they never have — but they’re absolutely convinced they can break our will, [that] the American people don’t have the stomach for the fight,” Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The vice president said U.S. allies in Afghanistan and Iraq “have doubts” the United States will finish the job there. “And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we’ve had in the United States,” he said. “Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists.”
The person validating the strategy of the terrorists is you, Mr. Cheney, by inducing panic and fearmongering while eroding the foundations of freedom and the civil rights of U.S. citizens, none of which makes us safer from terrorists, but all of which plays into your personal political agenda (and coincidentally lines your pockets at the same time.)
Via a friend, this article on Wired News titled “One Million Ways to Die“:
But despite the never-ending litany of warnings and endless stories of half-baked plots foiled, how likely are you, statistically speaking, to die from a terrorist attack?
Comparing official mortality data with the number of Americans who have been killed inside the United States by terrorism since the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma reveals that scores of threats are far more likely to kill an American than any terrorist — at least, statistically speaking.
In fact, your appendix is more likely to kill you than al-Qaida is.
No shit. Mine already tried. Ripped the sucker right out, I did.
I love the threat chart they provide to illustrate stuff you should probably worry about more than terrorism:
| S E V E R E Driving off the road: 254,419 Falling: 146,542 Accidental poisoning: 140,327 |
| H I G H Dying from work: 59,730 Walking down the street: 52,000. Accidentally drowning: 38,302 |
| E L E V A T E D Killed by the flu: 19,415 Dying from a hernia: 16,742 |
| G U A R D E D Accidental firing of a gun: 8,536 Electrocution: 5,171 |
| L O W Being shot by law enforcement: 3,949 Terrorism: 3147 Carbon monoxide in products: 1,554 |
I think “Dying from work: 59,730” as a high threat is my very favorite statistic.
I’ve tweaked my new design here and there, made some color use more consistent and added some extra flair. There are still some css layout changes that I need to make to fix a couple of pages, and I have a one-off template or two that need some work here and there.
I must say, I really enjoy looking at my own site now. Before I say that, though, I should probably look at it on the PC and in some different browsers to make sure it doesn’t look crap to anyone else. Heh. Looks fine everywhere I can test. I’ll look at in browsercam later.
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
by James W. Loewen
I threw in the towel and bailed on reading this book in depth, which I’ve resolved not to feel bad about. I did skim a lot of it though. I’m a HUGE fan of sociologist Loewen’s books, and this one is good, but I wasn’t as riveted to the material as I was when reading Lies my Teacher Told Me or Lies Across America.
Loewen likes to write history books about subjects that Americans prefer to gloss over, forget or try to put into the past without resolving, and this book certainly fits that theme. Sundown Towns were thousands of small rural towns, usually in the north and midwest, that did not allow black residents, and even posted signs warning blacks to “Not the the sun go down on them” in that town. This began after the civil war during reconstruction, and continued in an overt fashion until at least the sixties, with the fallout continuing on until the present day. Residents routinely created the all-white towns by driving out blacks through lynchings or mob violence, and enforced the sundown rules informally by intimidation or formally by town ordinances.
Part of what made me resist reading the book is that it’s similar in subject matter to the Indiana-themed book Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America, which I read and reviewed for IndyScribe. Our Town covers a particular rural Indiana town and its issues with race, while Sundown Towns covers a lot of ground.
Our flower beds have very depleted soil, so I picked up a load of compost this morning and spread it around the beds after overturning all the soil. It’s amazing how much compost this requires, really. I’ll need to get another load of crap for the front beds; a truckload only covered the beds on the south side of the house. Technically, it’s not just crap – it’s a mixture of compost, peat and topsoil. But it smells like crap and attracts LOTS of flies, so basically it’s crap.
You can see a bunch more pictures of the work I did here.
I got it from Indiana Mulch Company, because I priced it in comparison to the bags at Lowes and this is a way better deal. They also are handy because they’re right downtown (we pass them on the way to the recycling place) so I don’t have to drive all over to get it.
I in no way resembled this character while shoveling shit.