How to Deal with Hijacked Airplanes

Hijacker: This is a hijacking! I have a boxcutter!

Grandma: I have a .45! Now reach for the sky, or I'll put a hole in that diaper-hat on top of your pointy little head!

Hijacker: What?! I did not know Americans were allowed to carry handguns on airplanes! I thought the liberals took away your firearms and your gonads!

Grandma: What alternate universe do you live in? This is America, land of the free and home of the brave! And the armed!

Bureaucrat: Everyone put away your handguns and surrender! Do what they tell you! There won't be any trouble if you just act like sheep!

Grandma: Shut up you, you worthless idjit! (Smacks bureaucrat on top of his head, which causes him to cry like a girl.) Anyone who listens to anything said by anyone from the government deserves exactly what they get!

Hijacker: Surrender! We are going to fly these planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House!

Grandma: Bringing a knife to a gunfight, huh?

Hijacker: God will help me!

Grandma: God helps those who help themselves! And you need help right now! (BLAM!)

Hijacker: AIEEEE!! (claps hands over the hole in his forehead) The 72 virgins await me! (Topples over, exits.)

Other hijackers: Imams preserve us! Everyone on the plane has handguns pointed at us, pistols probably loaded with frangible ammo, which make horrible wounds in us but won't exit, thereby not penetrating the aircraft walls! (Looks pensive) Not that's any big deal, since aircraft are designed in case a hole appears, so nobody will be sucked out, like in Goldfinger. Now as to why Goldfinger got sucked out in the movie but Oddjob in the novel, I don't know. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah -- we surrender!

Passengers: (chorus): Oh, really?

Osama bin Laden: Dang. My plan to draw the U.S. into a war so the entire Islamic world will hate them just fell apart! Now I'll have to find another way to get America to bleed itself dry of blood and treasure! Drats! My nefarious plans foiled! (Looks pensive.) But then, on the other hand, I'm not going to end up a pile of squashed bones under a mountain in Afghanistan!

George Bush: Ah, shoot. Now I'll go down in history as a mediocre president who presided over a miniscule tax cut and some minor deregulation. (Looks pensive.) Well, I guess that's better than being known as a stumble-tongued fool who fell into Osama bin Laden's trap and started World War III!

Neocons: Dang! Our insane leftist plans to conquer the Middle East just went up in smoke! (Looks pensive.) On the other hand, at least we're not going to be exposed as the deluded, traitorous, crackpot, chickenhawk armchair-general cowards that all of us really are!

Father: Hi, honey! I'm home from my job at the World Trade Center!

Wife: Thank goodness! A bunch of nuts tried to hijack four planes and fly them right into the building where you work! The passengers shot a bunch of them and the rest surrendered!

Father: Wow! I might have been killed! Good thing those passengers were armed! Why, 3000 people could have been killed had the hijackers succeeded!

Daughter: Daddy! You're home!

Father: Yep, honey, safe and sound, thanks to the brave citizens of this wonderful country, who understand how utterly foolish and worthless the government really is.

Daughter: Yay for America! And .45 caliber semi-automatics!

The 4,000 Years Old War

When I hear journalists say "We are going to win this war on terrorism," I wonder, "Which war are they talking about?" We're involved in at least three.

World War I and the mistakes of the victors led to WWII. After WW II many Jews moved to the Middle East to found Israel (most people don't know it, but the Nazis were going to eradicate Christianity, too). These survivors, instead of moving into a peaceful land where they could be safe, found themselves in a war that had been going on for about 4,000 years. We became involved in it, even though it's none of our business, and ended up with attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon.

These attacks led to us conquering Afghanistan, even though we were attacked by Saudi Arabians, not Afghanistanis or the Taliban. Our invasion of Afghanistan is a continuation of both WWI and the unnamed millennia-old conflict in the Middle East.

That's two wars we are involved in. The third is the "Great Game," which is the war that's been going on in Central Asia since at least the 16th century, when conquering the khanates of Central Asia became a security priority for Russia. It began to be called "the Great Game" when England and Russia were vying for control of the area in the 19th century.

Those in the media are so ignorant they do not know these things. They understand the great mineral and oil wealth of Central Asia, but not much else about it.

My undergraduate degree is in journalism. I worked on two student newspapers, then three professional papers, first as a reporter, then as an editor. I do not hold most journalists in high regard. I've known too many of them. I call most of them "half-educated halfwits." I find many of them to be ignorant and arrogant people who believe they are intellectually and morally superior to the unwashed masses. Thomas Sowell has a term for these people - he mocks them as "the Anointed."

My opinion extends not only to print journalists, but to the talking heads on TV, and to those on radio. Especially AM radio. I recently heard one well-known commentator on AM radio claim, "We beat the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese, and we'll win this war."

True, we did beat the Nazis and the Japanese, at a terrible cost. (And notice how FDR's WWII ally Stalin has dropped out?) But we're still fighting World War II. When that Chinese pilot bumped our plane and sent himself into the ocean, that was a continuation of WWII. Our screw-ups during W.W.II allowed the Communists to take China. Vietnam, too, was continuation of WWII.

We're going to "win" this war the same way we're "winning" the war on drugs. It's going to go on for decades, and we're not going to have much to show for it except hatred from other countries in the world, the loss of astronomical sums of money, a creaking economy, and a slow but sure slippery-slope loss of our freedoms.

It is because of the ignorance of those in the media that they do not know how many wars we are involved in, or how long these wars have been going on. They also do not understand the American Empire is following in the footsteps of the Roman Empire. Or, for that matter, every empire that has ever existed.

Washington was right in his Farewell Address. Peaceful trade with all, political alliances with none. Unfortunately, his wisdom is being completely ignored.
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