AesopSpouse was in negotiations with a newly formed company to be their in-house patent counsel as soon as they had secured some venture capital, and they had an appointment lined up in NYC. In the WTC. On 9-13.
That never happened, the company folded, and we pursued other options.
Could have been worse.

To all the victim, direct and indirect, contemporary in time and later as their losses sank in: RIP.

The day of, I was on the Internet when someone posted that a plane had hit the WTC. Thinking it was a small plane, I still didn’t want to think about it so I logged off and ate breakfast. My sister called me and told me to turn on the TV.

I spent most of the day online, and my most useful contribution was announcing over and over in one set of newsgroups that we had a new one for telling everyone you were all right. And rumors were flying, and news articles were carefully reporting that a plane had gone down in Pennsylvania but it was unknown if it was connected.

Then Jerry Pournelle posted a letter from the father of a passenger (and rapidly got asked whether he had contacted the news agencies).

Which, of course, made all the other rumors more credible.

It’s impossible to convey that day to anyone who doesn’t remember it because they know what happened, and we didn’t.

We knew the absolute minimum of what had happened, and not the limit.

Some water pumping and filtration locations near me fixed up their landscaping pretty quick. If you weren’t aware of 9-11, you wouldn’t notice there’s no way a truck can get up to the buildings. Nice fieldstone retaining walls, great lush turf, good sized shrubs, all hiding berms. But..pretty. Other things happened; “alternate route” signs along interstates. In case somebody takes out an overpass, I suppose.

When I read that some blame Trump for Kirk’s murdered, my mind just reels.

Same reason so many tried to claim that 911 itself was an inside job planned by the GWB Administration (or Israel, or the aliens from Rigel XII, or maybe it was all of them in on it together). Or that Bush knowingly lied about WMDs, or planned the devastation of New Orleans by Katrina. Or any number of similar things. Remember, there are still people who insist Trump planned his own failed assassination as a head fake.

The thing is that some people psychologically, emotionally, need that stuff to be true, because actual reality is so troublesome and inconvenient.

(I actually suspect that the exact same impulse underlies the old saw that ‘the husband/wife is the last to know’ about an affair. If someone really, really doesn’t want their spouse to be betraying them, they can twist the evidence in their own mind to come up with explanations that preserve their emotional needs at the expense of facing the truth.)

Ever notice how many commentators and observers, on both Left and Right, really, seriously, don’t want to talk/hear/think about 911? They want to memory hole it because it messes everything up. I see articles from the isolationist right about Iraq and Afghanistan that don’t even mention 911, instead acting as if we invaded both places on a whim. The Left doesn’t even want to think about it, ‘some people did some stuff’, ‘it was a tragedy’ (almost like an accident), not an act of war.

911 makes a mockery many, many dreams, and leaves many dreamers frustrated and and flummoxed.

Not too different from the mindset that blames rape victims for wearing those short skirts.
Never mind that many of them never did.

How many could imagine that 24 years later a Muslim would be the front runner in New York’s mayoral race? Or that the mayor of London would be a Muslim man 15 years later?

Islamists took full advantage of every opportunity in the past quarter century as the west became bogged down and mired in disunity and confusion.