Month: September 2011

The Economist Publishes a Monstrous Lie

by

Gov. Rick Perry has famously called Social Security a ponzi scheme, a monstrous lie. The Economist magazine, in covering the story has now told its own monstrous lie. It is lying via a graph it included with the story.

Deceptive Social Security finance graph from the Economist
SS fantasy finances, Economist version

The legally mandated 2011 Social Security Trustee Report lays out the actual fund exhaustion date as 2023 on page 3 of the report. So, 2023, 2037, what’s the difference? Electorally, it’s a very big deal. If you’re a current beneficiary today at age 66, you would be 78 in 2023, right at the edge of your life expectancy but more likely than not you would be alive. You would be 92 in 2037 and more than likely dead. If a senior is going to be alive when the big Social Security benefit cut kicks in, it is within their planning window and consequently the chances that they will be a Perry voter go up. Up to now, attempts at reforming Social Security were done so early that the crisis was only going to affect somebody else. Now, every senior who grasps when the crisis will hit knows it will hit them when they are going to be older, weaker, and even more unemployable than they are now. By putting out a pretty, lying graph, the Economist gives ammunition to the left-leaning mass media to write their own stories that also minimize the number of seniors who grasp the truth.

In short, the Economist is putting false numbers out there, ones that will have an effect of lulling seniors into a poorer financial state right when they will be old and frail and unable to do anything about it. What happened to their editors, their fact checkers, their sense of decency? Is everybody to be sacrificed for the electoral convenience of US Democrats in the 2012?

It Could Have Been Me

by

Had my plans, or the jihadists’ plans, been altered just a bit, I could have been up on the WTC tower when it was struck and then fell. I would have been a tourist with my wife and infant daughter stopping in NYC on our way to visit my in-laws in Europe. We could have been part of the death roll. Had my parents rolled out of bed a few hours earlier to take our cousin on a more ambitious tour of Battery Park, they could have been on the death roll, crushed in a subway car passing under the site. I would have been getting a yearly invitation to come to NYC and mourn. How do those who actually get the invitations ever put their lives back together? I can’t imagine the yearly ritual of publicly ripping your emotional scabs off as the world watches.

I suspect that there are tens of thousands just like me. People who visited the area just a bit before or who had been planning to be there but for random chance, fortunate circumstance. Such things change you forever but nothing actually happened to you. Fate hands you the cruelest of brushback pitches and you don’t know what to do with it. It’s deadly chin music but not deadly for you. Do you step back from the batter’s box or crowd in even tighter, daring fate for a repeat? Neither attitude seems right. I claim no special insight or wisdom.

Year after year, people gear up for 9/11 memorials. They’re not for me. They shouldn’t be for me. But they could have been for me. And my heart is still unsettled every year around this time when I look at my older boy who might have been an orphan and my youngest who never would have been.

“We’re going to rush the hijackers.”

by

Two years ago I wrote this:

The only part of the American national security establishment that successfully defended America on 9/11 was the portion of the reserve militia on board Flight 93, acting without orders, without hierarchy, without uniforms or weapons, by spontaneous organization and action.

The lesson I derived:

Bottom-up, inductive, spontaneous self-organization is the essence of America.

After a decade I can say we have wasted a decade failing to learn from that lesson.

We had better do better over the next decade.

“Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.”

A minute by minute narrative of Flight 93, done as tweets today, is here. Scroll from the bottom. Very much worth reading.

My recollection of the day was in a comment here, written on September 11, 2004 — below the fold. It is funny how after ten years I had forgotten some of the details I had remembered three years later. You can say “we will never forget” but your brain fades away, and you forget whether you want to or not.

The weather this morning was exactly like the day ten years ago: Clear, warm, blue skies.

God bless America.

Read more

3,650 Days

by

Three thousand, six hundred fifty days, more or less,depending on leap years since the end of the 20th century. Oh, I know, calendar-wise, only a year or two off. But we don’t count strictly by the calendar. Afterwards, we count by events. Myself, I have the feeling that the 19th century didn’t truly end for good and all until 1914. That’s when the 20th century began, in the muddy trenches of WW1. All the previous comfortable understandings and optimistic assumptions of the earlier world were shattered right along with three monarchial dynasties, over the course of four years. When it was over, the world of the time before seemed impossibly far removed, to those who could remember it a number which, as the decades passed, became steadily fewer, until that old world was entirely the stuff of books, paintings and relics, rather than true human recollections. We eventually adjusted and accepted the new reality of things. The old way, and the shattering events in which it passed became a date on a monument, a paragraph in a history text, a book on the shelf.

Read more

9/11 Plus Ten Years

by

Simply evil: Christopher Hitchens suggests that sometimes the simple and obvious explanation for an event is more accurate than an explanation which relies on an elaborate structure of “nuance”

A time bomb from the Middle Ages. Roger Simon explains how 9/11 altered his worldview and many of his relationships

An attack, not a disaster or a tragedy. George Savage explains why the persistent use of terms like “tragedy” by the media acts to obfuscate the true nature of the 9/11 attacks. Much more on this from Mark Steyn

Claire Berlinski was in Paris on 9/11. Shortly thereafter she wrote this piece for City Journal

Marc Sasseville and Heather Penney were F-16 pilots with an Air National Guard squadron. Their order was to bring down Flight 93 before the terrorists in control of it could create another disaster on the scale of the World Trade Center…but their aircraft were configured for training, with no live ammunition and no missiles. A video interview with Major Penney here

Read more