Tag: 9/11 Terrorist Attack

ABCNews.Com reports that Cardinal Francis Arinze compared abortion and genetic research to the 9/11 terrorist attacks,

He appealed to Buddhists to work against “a culture of death, in which abortion, euthanasia and genetic experiments on human life itself have already obtained or are on the way to obtaining legal recognition.”

In his statement, Arinze said: “How can we not make a correlation between this culture of death in which the most innocent, defenseless, and critically ill human lives are threatened with death, and terrorist attacks, such as those of 11 September, in which thousands of innocent people were slaughtered?”

Even if I agreed with Arinze (and I’m diametrically opposed to him on all three issues), the comparison makes no sense. The last time I checked, the Sept. 11 terrorists were not part of our Western culture of death, but in fact were reactionary Islamists who rejected Western moral and scientific claims as decadent.

I suspect the Sept. 11 terrorists probably agreed with the Cardinal’s low opinion of Western culture.

Steve Denbeste’s comment also summed up my general feeling toward the Catholic Church at the moment,

I’m surprised he didn’t mention the use of birth control pills while he was at it. And child molestation – oh, wait a minute…

Jeff Deverett produces a kid’s show in Toronto called Ricky’s Room that is carried by some PBS channels. Deverett is currently protesting the new film, Death to Smoochy, a dark comedy about such children’s shows. According to Deverett, Death to Smoochy is the equivalent of the Sept. 11 attacks for kids.

When the World Trade Center fell, it was like a movie happening. But when a mascotted character like Barney gets his head blown off, that’s real. It’s real violence on their level. To [kids], this movie is Sept. 11.

Of course young kids who are watching an R-rated movie like this probably have at least one and maybe two problems that are far worse than anything in Death to Smoochy.

The funny thing is that Deverett claims he is suing Warner Bros. on the grounds that the Smoochy character is to close to his Ricky character. Yeah, because Everett’s the only person in the world who ever thought of putting an actor in a dumb-looking animal suit and building a kid’s show around it.

The 9/11 comparison, on the other hand, puts Deverett in a far more exclusive group of idiots.

Source:

Smoochy gets the kiss-off from kiddie show. Tamsen Tillson, Toronto Globe and Mail, March 27, 2002.

CNSNews.com reports that a man on trial for murder in New York plans to argue that he suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome from witnessing the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which combined with alleged statements by the victim, led him to bludgeon and stab to death his business partner.

Nathan Powell’s lawyer will argue that he flew into a rage and killed his business partner, Jawed Wassell, on October 3, 2001 after Wassell supposedly made pro-Taliban comments. Prosecutors argue that story is largely fiction, and what enraged Powell was that Wassell planned to reduce Powell’s share of the profit in a movie that the two were partners in.

Imagine this odd set of circumstances: suppose that Ayn Rand was still alive and wrote a song about the 9/11 attacks which was subsequently recorded by some wannabe techno group. It might sound a little something like this (2.5 megabyte MP3 download).

Definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, but Prodos has always amused me, and he’s running almost as many web sites as I am. His December Walk for Capitalism was certainly a far more creative idea than anything mainstream libertarians have come up with over the last decade.

(Thanks to Fredrik Norman for finding this).

Okay, I confess I have a lot of philosophical objections to making airport security workers federal employees, but there’s also a more practical reason — such a move would reduce rather than improve safety at airports.

Just look at what happened when a man managed to get past security with a bag full of knives. According to CNN, United Airlines immediately fired six security personnel and their supervisor who worked for a private security firm.

If they had been federal employees, however, firing these incompetents would have been a process that would have taken many months at a minimum. Given the strong role that unions have among federal employees, whether or not they could have been fired at all is questionable.

Yes, the Senate bill does contain language that would supposedly expedite the hiring and firing of security workers, but once the crisis atmosphere passes (and agencies like the EEOC inevitably water down the meaning of such provisions) these are likely to be a dead letter.

Personally, I don’t understand why there is such an emphasis on preventing people from being obvious weapons onto airplanes. Did I miss something here? Did the 9/11 terrorist sneak guns on board? Did they bring knives? Bombs?

No, they used box cutters and makeshift implements. You can spend all the money in the world and there is simply no way to prevent terrorists from bringing makeshift weapons onboard a plane. The current approach to airplane security seems to be adopting the “zero tolerance” philosophy of the war on drugs and recent anti-violence initiatives in schools, both of which have largely backfired.

I guess if what people really want is an illusion of security, then perhaps we’re accomplishing something — but not much more than that.