Open thread 9/15/23
Since this year’s 9/11 anniversary, I’ve watched more documentaries about it on YouTube. This is one that tells an extraordinary story. You may already know a bit about it – as I did – but the details are astounding:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
I think at least one Mainer comments here. Hope all y’all in New England will be safe in the storm.
Something that has bothered me since people started talking about the Twin Towers and 9/11: the term “jumpers.”
I remember looking at videos and photos of people crowded at windows, and I think most of those people didn’t “jump” (which implies actively and specifically choosing to do it) so much as they fell as more people crowded the windows trying to get air. There is one photo of a man falling, and some news outlet thought they identified it as a particular man and approached his family. They denied that it could be him because they claimed he never would have jumped.
We have no idea what happened with the people crowding the windows. I cannot begin to imagine what they were going through. Probably some people did jump, and probably some people did get pushed, but mostly, I think of them as falling.
Maybe people find that thinking of them as jumping is a comforting thought — that at the end, they had some agency in their fate. But maybe it is more comforting to their loved ones if they are thought of as falling.
I think they jumped.
Tonight at sundown starts the Jewish Rosh Hashanah aka Festival of Trumpets.
There is an eerie scene in the movie “Dog Day Afternoon”. The film, set in New York City, opens with a montage of NYC scenes as the opening credits roll. At one point the twin towers of the WTC are shown from across the river but for only a second, then a truck rolls by in front of the camera obscuring them and they are never seen again.
It looks for all the world like a symbolic comment on 9/11. Except the movie was made in 1975.
Something to watch when donating platelets tomorrow morning. I started giving blood and later platelets after 9/11. Something I could do.
Safety warning, I read this morning:
Wiring should not be done in thundering.
Encountering the leakage of water cut off power immediately.
Note: Lighting stroke [sic] is an accident, which will not be regarded as normal maintenance.
@Chases Eagles – That’s some great chinglish right there. Years ago in less woke times there used to be a website that catalogued some very funny examples of japanglish and chinglish.
I have two friends who survived a long fall. They were climbing an ice-laden couloir on Ypsilon Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park. The ice they were climbing on broke away. They fell about five hundred feet and landed on a steep snowbank, which they then slid down for another 1000 feet coming to rest at the foot of the snowbank where it was nearly level.
They were both injured but alive, and both were fully conscious during their fall. Their description of the experience was similar. Both felt no sense of fear and horror. Instead, they felt eerily calm and resigned to dying. I don’t know if this is what all people who fall long distances feel, but I would like to think so.
One of the best films about 9-11 is the 2-part movie “The Path to 9/11”, starring Harvey Keitel as John O’Neil, who took a job as head of security at the WTC a few weeks before 9/11 (and died that day), having been pushed out of the FBI. At the FBI he’d been agitating for years about the Muslim threat, and kept coming up against the resistance of Jamie Gorelick and others in the Clinton administration. Of course he contributed to his problems by making some mistakes and having a mess of a personal life. It’s a fascinating story, and the movie allegedly was quashed by the Clintons after one showing because it put them in a bad light. Part 1 at least is on YouTube. Not sure if Part 2 is there.
Part II is excellent: The terror attacks on the towers, and everything attendant thereto. Dramatic, heartbreaking, infuriating. The part that really sticks with me is when the NYC fireman, just prior to entering the towers, kneel before the NYCFD chaplin, and receive absolution — after which they stand and run into the blazing tower and, ultimately, their deaths. Eventually the chaplin himself is killed, by a falling body.
I downloaded Parts 1 & 2 from the Pirate Bay,
Nothing succeeds like corruption: “Volodymyr Zelenskyy is coming to America for the United Nations General Assembly next week. Zelenskyy plans to visit the White House in D.C. . . . Congress might give Ukraine $24 billion. . . . Biden has sought a package of $13.1 billion in additional military aid for Ukraine and $8.5 billion for humanitarian support. It also includes $2.3 billion for financing and to catalyze donors through the World Bank.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/09/zelenskyy-heading-to-d-c-as-congress-mulls-giving-ukraine-24-billion/
American taxpayers have already given Ukraine $76 billion since January 2022.
PA+Cat:
Throw them under the bus. Too bored to care?
Making Russia Great Again one neighbor at a time.
Lee Also,
This is merely guesswork based on the facts as I know them. I do not mean to know the thoughts or decisions of any of the people who perished in the twin towers or what they endured.
It seems likely to me that in fires as intense (ignited jet fuel) and pervasive (offices with limited to no visibility from smoke and debris) as those caused by the planes’ impacts one’s primary instinct is to go towards any possible option. If there were less heat, some oxygen and even daylight somewhere it seems that one would innately go there. As intense as the heat was, sitting still in or near the flames had to be unbearable. I would think most were not even thinking rationally or thinking much of anything at all. If any direction is a few degrees cooler, or has some oxygen or doesn’t contain flames, one would instinctually go there. Then, when one finds oneself at the building’s edge what does one do? Maybe some decided to end their fate by going into the fire? But my guess is it would be nearly impossible to have thoughts in an inferno that intense. It seems likely some or most at the building’s edge would take an additional step away from the incredible heat.
God bless them all.
om: I think Congress should offer Zelenskyy some of Hunter Biden’s “paintings” in lieu of cash. He can then sell them on the open “art” market.
One of the tragedies of the Russo-Ukraine war, aka Vlad’s little adventure, is that corruption and criminality of the Brandon crime family and corruption in Ukraine chiefly benefits Russia and Vlad’s fan boys.
Is the rest of Europe, except for Hungary, also corrupted in opposition of Russian imperial expansion? Conviently forgotten it seems is the long history of Clinton and Obama cozy relations with Russia and Vlad.
Humper Brandon’s art is certainly worth more than some hunk of metal be it a F-16, M1A2, GIMLR, ATACMS, GLSDB, or even 10,000 155 mm rounds. You can’t put a price on genius. (sarc)
But what does Tucker say?
Re: 9-11 jumpers
As I recall the media intentionally suppressed in their coverage videos of the falling bodies hitting the ground.
I can go both ways on that. To be sure it was horrifying. Witnesses spoke of the bodies not just striking the ground but literally exploding. Tough for adults and unsuitable for children.
OTOH that horror was part of the truth of that horrifying day. Sugarcoating that horror by censoring images and then the fallacious “Religion of Peace” rhetoric didn’t help either IMO.
Those videos are still suppressed on the web.
actually no one is winning except possibly china, the eu hates hungary and poland for their traditional cultural stances, as they hate their own countrymen most of all,
most every policy in this little caucasus scrum is designed to make us weaker, otherwise a whole different set of options would have been entertained
they sanction the camp of the saints, most recent example is the sicilian island of lampedusa, which is the subject of al hijra, invasion by mass immigration,
no hair on fire over those uzbek infiltrators ‘i’m sure it will be fine’ or it well end in blood and fury, that was romneys choices, mayorkas and garland have insured,
WRt the two firefighters kneeling before the chaplain.
As Catholics, they may not achieve heaven if they die in a state of mortal sin. Hence the frequency of confession and absolution.
When there is no time for the sacrament of confession, as before a battle, the priest may offer conditional absolution.
The guys must sincerely repent of their sins, make (recite) a good Act of Contrition, resolve to go to confession as soon as possible.
The priest then absolves them.
And “their spirit is not troubled as it rises”, quoting Mackinlay Kantor in his juvie book on Gettysburg, where conditional absolution is offered to the Irish Brigade.
There is some brief youtube footage from a movie on Gettysburg showing the process. Prob find it under “minstrel boy”.
You ask for conditional absolution when you don’t think you’ll live to get to the sacrament of confession.