Elaine Lafferty has a nice piece in the Irish Times about American attitudes toward terror vis a vis Europe's. But there's one statement that I find odd:

Thousands, not hundreds, of civilians were killed; the estimate in New York is that 30,000 to 40,000 children lost a parent in the attack on the World Trade Centre.

Am I missing something? Last I heard, the death estimates were about three thousand, give or take.

First of all, surely not all of the dead were parents. But even if they all were, and ignoring the cases where both parents were killed (hopefully rare), that would average out to over ten kids apiece. So who came up with this number and how was it derived?

Probably a typo... my guess is it should read '3,000 to 4,000'.

Maybe since she's most likely Catholic, she projected her own expectations for kids-per-family onto the victims...

An unfair jab at the Irish? Yep! But her piece really annoyed the hell out of me.

The article started off okay, but then there was that peculiar sentence: "Now before you leap up and declare that Americans are isolationist ignorant blood-thirsty maniacs who anyway have been executing people in Texas for years - all of which is pretty true[...]" The hell? Yeah, if I'm not in restraints at the end of the day I'm liable to go tearing off down the street naked, and I eat raw squirrels. Psychotic? No! Just another average American.

I can only hope that was a typo, and she meant to phrase that in another way...

Ok now I am miffed, Stephen did my gag. One does wonder how she came about that figure. Unless, of course she was taking into account all the foreign workers who were sending money back home. At least she express sympathy instead of that vile women in NYPost who had more sympathy for the animals left alone than she did for the victims.

I have actually seen that figure about children losing a parent before, on a really annoying flashbulb billboard for a BMW dealership off 210 in Monrovia (Assael BMW, for those who care). Aside from lots of b.s. "inspirational" messages, they throw that stat up. I don't know where it comes from, but it makes no sense.