Welcome to CaturSaturday, September 12, 2026 and shabbos for Jewish cats as well as the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, with the holiday ending tomorrow at sundown. The shofar, or ram’s horn, is blown at various points during the holiday; here’s an example:
This reminds me of a joke, but since it’s not family-friendly I can’t write it down here.
It’s also German Language Day, National Blackberry Day, National Chocolate Milkshake Day, and World Dolphin Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
There were plenty of memoriams and articles about the 9/11 attacks that occured 25 years ago yesterday. I will only mention one short piece from the NYT below, as you can find the pieces everywhere, and I have little to add to them. Like nearly all Americans, I watched the attacks on television (turning it o0n after the North tower was hit; we had a b&w television in the lab back then), and saw the South Tower hit live, which made clear it was a terrorist attack. Processing it mentally took days, like the JFK assassination, and I was glad they caught the perpetrators, though I would have liked to see Bin Laden captured alive and tried. The people jumping off the buildings to their deaths, the recordings of phone calls of people about to die, calling their loved ones to say goodbye—all this was ineffably heartbreaking. And because it’s ineffable, I don’t have much to say about it that hasn’t been said by others.
*Yesterday’s New York Times morning newsletter discusses the “meaning” of 9/11, as if their lucubrations carried weight, but there is also a section about what remains unresolved about the attack:
What remains unresolved:
The forever war. Al Qaeda, the terrorist group American troops went abroad to fight in the weeks after 9/11, is still a force in Afghanistan. By one estimate, the war on terror cost more than $8 trillion and 900,000 lives. This collection of images from 25 years of conflict is sobering. (The photograph from a 2009 suicide bombing in Kabul, in particular, has stayed with me all this time.)
The site. A quarter-century after the attack, the apartment building designed to replace 5 World Trade Center still hasn’t gone up. Around the corner, the 9/11 Museum is struggling to stay afloat. About one in three Americans was born after Sept. 11; it may have shaped their lives, but their memories are not seared.
The historical significance. At the time, it seemed that something was ending and another thing, maybe worse, was beginning. But was it? Charles Homans argues that life does not divide into neat geopolitical demarcations. Instead, 9/11 “is a middle chapter in the story of American fracture rather than the pyrotechnic beginning.”
For more
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I watched the NBC News last night, and the coverage of 9/11 lasted half an hour. They ended saying that we need to “learn the lessons” of that day, but they barely mentioned the cause of the terrorist attack, never mentioning “Muslim” or “Islam,” and mentioned “Al Qaeda” only once.
If you wish, please note in a comment where you were when you learned about the Twin Towers/Pentagon attack, and how it affected you.
*Rather than reiterate the NYT’s extensive memories of 9/11, here’s an oped by a WSJ editor, “September 11 changed the world order. But not for the reason we may think.” (The NYT has an editors’ op-ed that makes the same point.)
When the World Trade Center towers crashed to the ground 25 years ago, they triggered a seismic wave that seemed to smash the world order.
It was now “a different world,” President George W. Bush warned Congress. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared: “It was before 9/11 and after 9/11.” Vice President Dick Cheney added: “That day changed everything.”
They were right, with a caveat. The attacks were a monumental tragedy. The world order did change. But it was the aftermath—the U.S. response to 9/11, not the terrorism itself—that made the difference.
Sept. 11 marked a shockingly successful attack by a stateless and relatively small group of Islamist militants. The U.S., though, launched a massive military response: a War on Terror. It attacked two countries, one uninvolved with 9/11. The rhetoric was so sweeping, Washington borrowed language from World War II and the Cold War. America was now confronting an Axis of Evil.
Consumed by the War on Terror, the U.S. had less capacity to address other global priorities such as the pivotal rise of China and an increasingly hostile Russia. That inattention to shifting global forces was what really changed the world.
U.S. leaders were “certainly distracted” and “we continually found ourselves sucked back into the morass of our misadventures in the Middle East,” William Burns, who served in several administrations and later became director of the CIA, said in 2019. “Imagine if a bigger part of the time, energy and resources spent on the Global War on Terror had instead been spent on giving form to an affirmative vision for America’s role in Asia.”
“China and Russia have welcomed” the War on Terror, the scholar Robert Kagan wrote in 2008, “because it has distracted the United States’ strategic focus away from them.”
And this is blamed on the U.S. response to 9/11:
“While the U.S. was heavily involved in the Middle East and South Asia…the geopolitical balance moved against the U.S. in both Europe and East Asia thanks to the emergence of a more aggressive Russia and a more capable and assertive China,” Richard Haass, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in 2021.
When Russia invaded Georgia (during George W. Bush’s presidency) and then seized Crimea (during Barack Obama’s presidency), Western responses failed to prevent further expansionism. Russia later launched a full-scale war against Ukraine. Many analysts say the West should have imposed much tougher sanctions on Russia, and done a better job arming vulnerable neighbors, among other measures.
“Russia’s war against Ukraine is what failed deterrence looks like,” writes Ben Hodges, former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe. “We were not ready or united in recognizing that Russia was a real threat.”
Yes, this all may be true, but somehow I find it a bit unseemly to chastise America for getting into unwinnable wars in an attempt to strike back after the 9/11 attacks. We didn’t know the outcome at the time, nor did we know where the world was going. 9/11 was a huge punch in the national solar plexus, and it’s understandable that we had a strong and perhaps not totally thought-out reaction. But tut-tutting now when nearly 3,000 lives were lost seems like a cheap shot.
*Trump made another stupid gesture at the “Republican midterm convention” on Thursday, a promise to give all American five thousand bucks if the GOP retains both houses of Congress after the midterms. It’s not only dumb and impossibly expensive, but we all know Trump is not serious.
President Donald Trump pledged Wednesday to send every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, an extraordinary gambit to reverse his party’s sagging fortunes in November.
The dubious promise would most likely cost more than $1 trillion and require congressional approval, and would further exacerbate the country’s nearly $1.8 trillion annual budget deficit and concerns about inflation.
“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump said during the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas. “It will be called the Trump Dividend.”
He likened the payments to a corporation’s distributions to shareholders, citing “our tremendous strength and success economically.”
Within an hour, Vice President JD Vance appeared to try to walk back Trump’s proposal — at least in part — by suggesting the dividend payments would not go to the wealthy. Vance suggested it could be paid for by U.S. tariff revenues, though the suggested payment dwarfs what the U.S. has taken in through the protectionist measures.
This is nothing more than a bribe to vote Republican, and I pity the fools who do so expecting to line their pockets. It’s a promise that won’t be kept, as so many of Trump’s other promises. I swear—every day, when I think he can’t do anything more stupid than he’s done, he goes ahead and crosses another line. Now he’s running scared because voter sentiment and his low approval rating portends bit Republican losses in the midterms.
*The founding editor of Ms. Magazine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, has a nice memoriam in the NYT, “My 55 year friendship with Gloria Steinem” (archived here).
“What’s Gloria really like?”
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked that question since Gloria Steinem and I teamed up with a group of other editors to start Ms. magazine and, in the process, launched our 55-year friendship. As opposed to, “What’s Gloria’s cell number?”, to which my usual reply was, “You’ve got to be kidding,” when queried about the “real” Gloria, I always answered: “What you see is what I get; only I get more of it, up close.”
People find it hard to believe that someone as famous as Gloria had spent most of her life trying to evade the spotlight. She hated her celebrity status and was plagued by stage fright. What most clearly defined her was not a quote, gift, gesture or anecdote. It was her intrepid, lifelong resistance to being made the face of the women’s movement. Cameras ceaselessly sought her out; interviewers behaved as if hers was the definitive voice to speak on women’s issues or American feminism. Instead, she consistently deflected credit to women who couldn’t command media attention for their urgent work in, say, women’s health, reproductive rights, academia, labor unions or rape crisis counseling.
Put plainly, for Gloria, the personal was political and the political was personal. The warm, eloquent, witty writer and activist the world came to know was the same person in every setting: at a friend’s dinner table, where she’d rattle off puns and remind us to lobby our Congress members on an anti-discrimination bill, or in her living room hosting a “talking circle” of young women, none of whom she’d ever met before.
I didn’t know she was half Jewish (her dad was, her mom wasn’t):
. . . . Gloria loved our seder’s boldly revisionist, women-focused ceremonies, starting with an opening ritual of introducing ourselves by our matrilineage. Gloria’s voice was as loud as the rest of ours when we called out contributions to our list of the Ten Plagues (or more) suffered by women and the Four Questions (or more) that women never got to ask. She used to say, “Never in my life have I identified myself as a Christian, but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”
. . .She once told her friends the line she wanted engraved on her tombstone: “Wait! I’m not done.” Gloria showed us the virtues of building a movement one person, one new coalition, one rebellious action and one act of kindness at a time.
Last year, she gave her friends beaded bracelets that proclaimed, “We are linked, not ranked.” The message was directed at us, but also at everyone who might see it. We’re not done.
It is a lovely paean to a woman who avoided the limelight as much as she could.
*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: I am not satisfied that the appellant is bisexual.”
→ AI will steal your work: After rumors swirled about a solution to a Millennium Problem, a set of famously unsolved math problems, OpenAI spun up all its resources to solve it first. And they did, I guess. Congrats! Or, um, how dare you? The internet is divided!
Sam Altman admits they solved the problem because they heard a solution was coming: “It is true that we tried this because there were rumors on the internet last week that Anthropic’s models had solved a [M]illennium [P]roblem and we were curious if ours could do it too.” Guys, don’t be jerks just for the fun of it. Like, let those weird professors whose names no one knows solve their one math puzzle across decades in peace so they can eventually go to the awards lunch and have a turkey sandwich. But no. And the best part is that the mathematicians were using OpenAI tools in some capacity, and so it’s possible these AI tools took their human knowledge and then borrowed it on the side to solve the equation in full. The company writes: “We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly—in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.” OpenAI tools are one big mind. If you give them something, they know that information and will use it anywhere else. It is a collective consciousness. It would be like Google Docs deciding to publish that book you’re working on as a Google Doc production; like, I guess it’s technically true.
The sad, forgotten human names: Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster. Sorry guys. You can read Tristan’s statement about all this drama. It’s long and detailed and hard to parse, because he’s a brilliant mathematician and that’s kind of their thing. I’ll get ChatGPT to summarize it later.
→ Perhaps some of the asylum claims are less than genuine: Only about 1 in 100 asylum claims in the UK is credible, according to one UK Home Office official and whistleblower. The whistleblower, identified as “J” in The Times, says many asylum seekers arrive with what are called “package claims,” suspiciously similar asylum narratives. He says Iraqi Kurds, for example, often claim the same story of having had a romantic relationship with the daughter of the prime minister of the Kurdistan Region. So many claim this, he says, that it’s become a “running joke” among co-workers. I don’t judge the princess of Kurdistan, but I do have some logistical questions. Then tons of Pakistani asylum seekers, J says, have claimed they were in a homosexual relationship (yes, we’ve covered this before, but there’s a twist this time) with the same man! Who provided letters supporting their claims! The whistleblower said those homosexuality claims also featured photos from the same London gay hot spot, Legs 800 Club, which closed last year, of Pakistani men “standing there topless in the club with their arms around each other taking pictures to try and prove they are gay.” This is an amazing pitch for a Vogue centerfold editorial.
And what of the Bangladeshi asylum seekers? Many of those applicants allegedly claim they were part of a political party called the Awami League, but can’t answer basic questions about the party or their role in it. Weird!
→ Speaking of bogus asylum claims: This week in bizarro Daily Mail headlines: “Shameless failed asylum seeker who raped a 14-year-old girl is NOT bisexual—and must leave Britain, judge rules.” I guess if he were bisexual, he could stay. But not a straight man. It’s a bridge too far. The immigration tribunal found his evidence of bisexuality was suspect. Judge R. Abdar said in the immigration tribunal’s conclusion: “I am satisfied that the appellant has failed to rebut the presumption of the appellant posing a danger to the community. I am not satisfied that the appellant is bisexual.” I am not satisfied that the appellant is bisexual. Can you imagine a tribunal about your bisexual status? You have to place yourself on a spectrum of fruity to bland, name five women and five men you’re equally attracted to, demonstrate proficiency in mouth stuff to both sexes (hell), and then a verdict is delivered. I mean, my college co-op was a tribunal about bisexual status every night, but can you imagine like, a real British judge doing this? Do you think he wears the wig when he asks defendants which cast member they identify with most on Queer Eye? “I am not satisfied that the appellant is bisexual” sounds like the judge had a bad night with the appellant. Honestly, it sounds like the appellant is just experimenting in college and will probably grow out of it, which means deportation.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is checking out the situation:
Hili: Where are you going?
Szaron: To make the rounds of the local reality.
In Polish:
Hili: Dokąd idziesz?
Szaron: Na obchód lokalnej rzeczywistości.
*******************
From Fat Cat Art: security throughout the world
From Things With Faces:
From Clean, Funny & Cute Animal Memes:
Masih turned fifty yesterday, and had some thoughts on turning a half-century old:
Today is my birthday. And somehow, I am beginning fifty suspended between earth and sky.
I had a flight to catch, so here I am, looking down at the world from an airplane window, thinking about the woman I have become and all the women we are still fighting to be free enough to… pic.twitter.com/8HqyoWQBFZ
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 11, 2026
From Larry the Cat about Trump’s offer of $5K dollars to Americans for, in effect, voting for Republicans. As Hamlet said, “The funeral baked meats/Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
Handing out free money to win elections is wrong https://t.co/haTyPqNjL4
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) September 10, 2026
From Malcolm. This is a bit grim, but it’s biology, Jake! Translation from the Turkish: “This snapping turtle uses its tongue like a live bait to catch fish.”
Bu kapan kaplumbağası, balıkları yakalamak için dilini canlı bir yem gibi kullanıyor. pic.twitter.com/l09gjHZiV1
— Belgesel Dünyası (@belgeseIdunyasi) September 8, 2026
Two from my feed. I don’t think this first one is AI or fake:
Mamdani and AOC are spotted laughing with each other as people cry while the names of those who died are read during the 9/11 Memorial in New York City. pic.twitter.com/Ib5lm57fmV
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 11, 2026
I love this one. It’s been so much fun controlling Hollywood!
Agents,
As the sun sets on 5786, we would like to thank you for another successful year of controlling the weather, the media, the banks, Hollywood, global shipping, your neighbor’s Wi-Fi and the price of eggs.
We have an ambitious operational schedule for 5787:
✅ Convince… pic.twitter.com/5lyfpBKNO8
— The Mossad: Satirical and Awesome (@TheMossadIL) September 11, 2026
Translation from the Spanish:
How do I explain to the psychologist that I saw a lost little kitten and its mom found her, scolded her, and after checking that she was okay, gave her a smack and took her home.
Cómo le explico al psicólogo que vi una gatita perdida y su mamá la encontró, le dió una regañada y después de ver que estuviera bien, le dió una cachetada y se la llevó a la casa. pic.twitter.com/5A15hxLo7Q
— El CondeNado (@elconde_nad0) September 10, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was three years old and would be 87 today had she lived. https://t.co/e2y6FgIvkE
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 12, 2026
Two from Matthew. First, a lovely millipede:
Take a stroll along a mossy log with this Euryurus leachii, one of eastern North America’s beautiful native millipedes.
— invertebrate (@crevicedwelling.bsky.social) 2026-09-11T14:22:47.240Z
I don’t know if the dogs like this song. Click screenshot to hear it:
25 years ago, I was living in Los Angeles. I woke up to get ready for work, turned on the television, and saw that the first tower was in flames. I thought this is crazy, such a beautiful day, maybe a small plane smashed into the building. My roommate came into watch with me, and then we witnessed the other plane hit the tower and knew that it was a terrorist attack. Then the Pentagon and the plane that went down in Pennsylvania.
Unrelated to 9/11, I’ve been staying in lower down town Manhattan for the last couple of days. Yesterday afternoon we went to a local bar. There were a group of about 10 or 12 firemen all in their dress uniforms, so we bought them a round of drinks. They came over and thanked us and told us many stories of that day; some of the older ones were at ground zero 25 years ago.
I was living in Toronto and about to go to the gym. As I went to turn off the radio, the news came on that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I had the same thought, that a small plane had somehow accidentally collided with the building. I turned on the TV and was watching the live coverage as the second plane hit.
Well, since you asked, I had taken my son to New York for a week of sightseeing after his high school graduation. We were at the World Trade Center at 4PM, Monday, the day before the attack—after visiting the Statue of Liberty—I mailed 6 postcards in the building, that were never delivered. We had toured the towers on Sunday. On Tuesday, the day of the attack, I had wanted to take the subway to get to Wall Street for the opening, but my son was on west coast time and wanted to sleep in, so I let him. We were north at 33rd and 2nd Ave in a diner eating breakfast when the first plane hit. After that, it was a steady stream of sirens as fire trucks and ambulances came down 2nd Ave, literally by the hundreds, from all the surrounding cities and areas. From where we were on the ground, we could not see the towers, just the smoke billowing up. It looked like what we saw in Portland, after the eruption of Mt St. Helens, with cars covered with an inch of ash, driving north from the area. As we walked around people were walking uptown to where the subways still worked, with clothes covered with ash and dirt. Some were crying, others hugging each other. Some were headed to the various schools around Manhattan to get their children. Later in the day, we came upon a line of people 2 and 3 deep that stretched around several blocks–as we got closer we saw it was the blood donor line going into one of the hospitals. By the afternoon, cranes, loaders, vans and convoys of soldiers and police were on all streets driving downtown. The next day we saw a convoy of 7 long semi-truck parked on the side of our street, (2nd Ave & 33rd). Later on the news, we saw that they were all refrigerated vans that were brought in for bodies. I also saw another long convoy of five very large tanker trucks of liquid nitrogen go downtown,(I assume for putting out fires?) We didn’t have much to do the next two days as everything closed down, so we just walked around. After two days and nights of continuous vehicles driving right beside where we stayed, we both still heard sirens in our ears later. The smell that permeated the air was unlike anything we were familiar with, and was another lingering unpleasant memory.
Before 9/11, we had reserved a rental car to drive to Philadelphia, but because the office was on 22nd and closed, we were told to go up to the office on 84th St, the day before. On the day of our departure, we made our way up to 84th St. and when we got there they told us the office on 22nd had reopened so we had to go way back down there, but we finally got a car, since we had a reservation. With all the flights grounded, there were a lot of people trying to rent cars. Since we had unlimited mileage and no drop-off fee, my son thought we should start out driving for home, but we went to Philadelphia as planned & tried for two days to get out of the airport. Even though we had free mileage tickets, they put us in first class to Detroit but then the flight there got cancelled so we had to start over. At both airports I was selected for random luggage searches. We were given free meal vouchers so we went to their best restaurant and my son ordered BBQ spare ribs, but they wouldn’t give him a knife to cut them apart, even though it was behind a secured entrance, and with the hijackings, this was the start of the hyper-vigilance for any type of knife or weapon.
From Frank Culbertson, only American in space that day on ISS, Space.com has some of his comments and photos of the fire from space as he passed over nyc. At url
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/human-spaceflight/25-years-ago-a-nasa-astronaut-witnessed-the-tragic-9-11-attacks-from-space-heres-what-he-saw
Trump’s $5,000 “bribe” is not a bribe. It’s not a plan. It’s not a concept of a plan. It’s not even a troll. It’s a piece of red meat tossed out to his gullible supporters because he has no plan, but the media continually takes his utterances seriously. I’ve now read five deep and lengthy articles analyzing his “bribe” regarding what it would cost and the legality of offering monetary compensation for votes. As with most things Trump spouts, it is much ado about nothing. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
My on-going hypothesis is that these sorts of proclamations are mainly to re-direct news commentary away from many real troubles that he has caused.
Oh, there was an interesting piece yesterday contra the A.I. doom panic: “Stop Panicking About AI.”
This may be a duplicate post. I think WordPress ate my first comment. If so, sorry.
I know that joke! Ha!
I don’t care if Trump’s $5000 “dividend” is a bribe. The entire welfare state has been a Democratic bribe for sixty years. (Or, worse, it’s been blackmail: Want the money to keep flowing? Then you’d better vote Democrat.) What I care about is that it would likely be inflationary, just as Biden’s bribes were. If we actually have that money laying around (I doubt it), then put it right against the debt.
The asylum seekers’ claims remind me of a gag from the Laurel and Hardy picture The Beau Hunks. Ollie is jilted by his girl, so they join the Foreign Legion, famous as a refuge for broken hearts. Sure enough, every man in their outfit has a broken heart. The gag is, as revealed by the picture they all carry, that it’s the same girl.
Thank you for your comments. I think the $5,000 promise is unseemly, as are many things the president says. Some people, however, are so venomous in their hate–and it’s pretty unseemly too. Biden did many unseemly things too. Yes, I know almost 50 percent of the country didn’t vote for Trump. Many voted for Trump mostly because they thought Harris was an even worse option. The election, it turns out, is over. Being furious all the time doesn’t change anything.
I see a group of middle-aged people and retired folks periodically getting together to hold signs at a busy intersection. The signs essentially say how much they don’t like Trump. It doesn’t affect anything or anyone when they do this, and I find it pitiful. All people can do is try to read balanced accounts of the issues and prepare for the midterms.
I was in Toronto that day, at my office overlooking the runways of Toronto’s Pearson Airport. Our secretary, who usually had the radio on at her desk, mentioned that a small plane had hit the WTC, which was strange but we kept on working. Then the 2nd plane hit and we all realized the implications. In the midst of all this, I called my (then) husband, who was running the newsroom of the Toronto Star, to see what he knew and while we were speaking, someone said something to him and he said “a plane’s just hit the Pentagon, I gotta go” and hung up. At this point I think I was in shock – I can still hear that phrase like it was yesterday. Meanwhile the company, at that time Canada’s largest wireless carrier, had to scramble, to go into code “orange” (I think), which meant prioritizing all voice & data traffic of first responders and authorities. Plus, our entire board was meeting that very moment at the top of a tower in downtown Toronto, so there was a scramble to get them out. For a while many of us were in one of the large meeting rooms, watching the news, but eventually I went back to my office. There I suddenly realized what else felt strange – the constant takeoffs & landings from the airport, which were the background to my workdays outside my window, had stopped completely. What a horrible day. And in so many ways, impacted the rest of my life, including a stint working in Afghanistan years later. I almost pity young people today, who never lived through that and have no understanding of how the world changed that day.
What I remember is the aftermath stories– the flight instructor who was teaching a group of men, all living together, all knew each other, and when he got to the “How to land the plane” part, they said they weren’t interested or words to that effect.
And weren’t there OTHER such small items that were reported to security as being suspicious or alarming, that were never followed up on and never taken seriously?
I was in the Math workroom in Oakville, just west of Toronto, about to go into my first class of the day (2nd period). My colleagues said that a plane had just crashed into the Trade Towers in NYC. We all figured it was a small plane, until the second one hit a few minutes later. I went into my class. It was either ninth or 10th grade I can’t remember now. And I told the kids what was happening and that as an American I found it especially distressing and that my widowed mother lived in western Pennsylvania. I somehow found a radio for them to listen to, and then went back to the work room to get something else. When I got back to the class one young boy said another plane crashed in Western Pennsylvania. I said please don’t make jokes and it turned out to be true and less than an hour from where my mother and father had retired. I tried to get through to my mother for hours that day, but of course all the lines were all busy. Either the next day or the day after she had a ticket to fly up to see a friend in Westchester County. When I finally got through to her, she gave me the number of this friend. When I called to check up on her, I must’ve misdialed because I got this very pleasant woman who was going on and on about how wonderful it was to see all the American flags being waved at that multi-denominational ceremony in Yankee Stadium was it? Somehow this hit me wrong I feel I’m a very patriotic American and now Canadian as well, but I have never loved all this flag waving. It was great that everybody could come together at that stadium, but why all the flags?? And PS…thanks to all the wonderful Canadians in Gander, Nfld, which I happened to drive through this past June. Of course Trump doesn’t appreciate that🙁
I too, was in a classroom that morning, teaching a grade 11 English class in a small high school in Eastern Ontario. But I was outside in a portable, so it wasn’t until my class was over and I came back into the school building after Period 1 that I learned about the attack. My first indication was seeing one of my colleagues rushing down the hallway past me. His face was white and he said “the world trade centre has been bombed”. This particular colleague is always smiling, laughing and joking around, so I knew this was very serious. He told me he was going to the staff room to call his wife and tell her to collect their 3 girls from school immediately and bring them home. We went into the staff room and someone had brought in a TV (we didn’t ever have a TV in the staff room) and everyone was watching as the first tower collapsed. The shock in the room was unbelievable. A bunch of educators, all of whom then had to go into classrooms full of teenagers and try to teach and act normal. It was a very difficult day. It reminded me so much of that day, when I was in grade 9, and the announcement came over the PA that President Kennedy had been shot and we were all sent home. This was in the same Canadian town, west of Toronto as you mentioned Merilee.
Were you teaching at OT by any chance? That’s where I went to high school.
Small world, Claudia! I taught at OT the last year of the old building. Later taught mostly at Iroquois Ridge. (Now go to the gym at what used to be the old hospital next door to OT). I think I was in 11th grade in Vienna when Kennedy was shot. It was later in the day in Europe so we were home from school. MY parents were out at a dinner party and an American journalist in Berlin, iirc, called and I answered and he told me the news. I had to track down my parents to tell them.
Where do you live in eastern Ontario?
Small world indeed!
The old hospital is a gym now? Holy Moly!
I live just outside of Carleton Place, between C.P. and Perth, about 40 km from Ottawa.
The old hospital parking garage is still there for the gym, but it’s free now. The old high school is still standing, though seemingly slowly rotting. It’s apparently a heritage site which they can’t tear down and is often used for shooting movies. Horroe films??
Someone in the corridor at work said that there had a been a big terrorist attack in the US, so I went back to my office and followed it on the BBC News website.
I clearly recall that my first coherent thought was “So they haven’t got nukes then? Thank God for that.”
You may remember that all through the late 90s the big worry was that islamic terrorists would get hold of nuclear material, probably through Kazakhstan. That worry has never gone away, of course.
I remember 9/11/01 clearly as it was the culmination of a series of bad events in my family. I had taken the previous summer off and left home to deal with the decline and death of my father and to get my mother into a care home, as she was too frail to manage on her own. I had just returned home the previous day. As I drove into work on that day for the first time in three months, I recall thinking what an unusually nice day it was for early Sept in Boston. I arrived, started to try to get back up to speed, only to hear about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. Thought it was just some lost Cessna. The truth became clearer as more events occurred. Everyone in the biotech company where I worked just looked frightened and confused. We all went home around noon. Upon getting home, I found out that my Israeli wife hadn’t known about the attacks. She had been working at home that morning and hadn’t been paying attention to the news. The sound of the fighter jets overhead hadn’t alarmed her at all–Israelis are used to that. It took me quite a while to get back together.
I still don’t like to think about that time.
Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez laughing at the memorial. Was it really just a party for them? A photo-op? An abstraction?
NewsNation had an excellent one-hour special last night on the 9/11 attacks. They did indeed connect it to Islamic extremism, and made clear that the problem is still with us.
On that fateful day, I watched the coverage at home before going to work at Microsoft. When I had to leave the house, I took a portable radio with me. Everyone on the bus crowded around me to listen to the live coverage. What we heard was the news that one of the towers had collapsed. We were all stunned. In the afternoon I was scheduled to lead a meeting, which I did. We discussed nothing but the bombing. One of the attendees said that I was “heartless” for holding the meeting, but I don’t think he meant it seriously. I wasn’t being heartless. I, like the other attendees, met for the sheer comfort of having human contact.
Incidentally, the Microsoft building in which I worked was in Seattle at that time, not in Redmond. The building was the World Trade Center (https://www.wtcseattle.com/). And yes, it was scary to think that we, too, were in the World Trade Center.
At least you are asking questions. Is there any site where i can see the reactions/presence of various politicians with times throughout the entire event? Was this during the name reading?
[The former head of security for Rudy Giuliani – who was the city’s mayor during the terror attacks – said videos of the two leaders “laughing are not true.”
Michael Ragusa wrote on social media he was standing next to Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez for the entire ceremony.
“The camera just caught her greeting him hello. Multiple other politicians were laughing and joking behind me. Republicans and Democrats,” Ragusa said on X.
And for the record I am a life long republican who has been very critical of these two. I’m just sick of this fake news and people just saying whatever they want.
Ragusa later clapped back at some of the comments on his post, which argued that he was wrong. “I was there bro. It’s not true,” he wrote to one user.]
On the west coast (Victoria, BC) it was still early. It was my son’s 25th birthday, 3 days before my 50th. Someone called him and he told me. I was stunned but had to get up and go to work.
It was unthinkable. I would never have imagined such a thing.
But yes, the US had to do something. They couldn’t ignore something of that magnitude. And yes it was Islamic terrorists. I hadn’t given Islam much thought until then.
I was living in 108 Mile Ranch, British Columbia with my wife and two daughters, 14 and 16. We were awakened by a news bulletin at 7:00 AM pacific time, and immediately went down to the basement and turned on the TV. I watched in horror as the second tower fell, and thought “all those people”. That day eventually led me to join the Canadian military as a reservist, and in 2009 I was deployed as a medical officer to Kandahar city. That September day certainly changed my life, as it did many others.
Politicians promise free stuff all the time. Free child care! Free health care! We will freeze your rent! Free bus rides! Tax cuts for everyone! Student loan forgiveness!
Trump is blunt and crude, but in my view there is no real difference.
I think it’s a shame that it has come to this: no real difference is seen between Donald Trump and politicians (left or right) who are at least trying to make people’s lives better.
I would report that to the (R)SPCA
A politician’s job is to get themselves re-elected, or their people re-elected. I was reading about the religious significance of Rosh Hashanah. Interesting stuff!
I was downstate with several colleagues from our office in Chicago, working with our clients at University of Illinois Springfield. We were in meetings, when someone came in to tell us there had been attacks. The meetings were immediately canceled. We returned to our B&B. There was a small TV in my room and I watched replays of the attacks over and over, which was easy as they were being played over and over. At some point, the initial shock wore off and my impulse was to call the people I loved even though they were not in harm’s way. I was the only one on the team with a cell phone, so I offered it to everyone, as we all wanted to call home.
I think that the Bush administration made poor decisions after the attacks. I trusted them when they told the world why attacking Iraq was necessary. We now know we were lied to, plain and simple, about weapons of mass destruction.
The big change in the world was announced a dozen years before 9/11/2001. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, supreme leader of the Iran Islamic Republic and religious authority for the entire Muslim ummah, issued this directive: “ I am informing all brave Muslims of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth.”
This was a big change. During the Cold War, no official of either Communist or Capitalist governments had ever ordered its supporters to murder opposition writers, editors, and publishers. It was only a small step from killing writers and literature workers to killing office workers in a financial center, and airplane passengers of a country that showed insufficient fealty to the sacred beliefs of Muslims.
Authorized murder of apostates, heretics, and “enemies of God”, still standard in Islam, was once more prevalent in the West than it has been in the last several hundred years. Even in late Medieval times, the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions maintained elaborate judicial processes to determine an execution judgement; and never assigned it to the general believer public.
On 9/11 I was living in Healdsburg CA with my then girl friend, now wife. My future mother-in-law, who I had not yet met, was flying from London to San Francisco. We were going to pick her up late that evening after work. That morning we were getting ready for work when a colleague who knew my mother-in-law was arriving that day called and asked if we’d seen the news. We hadn’t. It was stunning and surreal. Unlikely though it would be, we immediately feared her flight could have been involved and tried to determine where her flight would have been at the time. Eventually it was revealed that all three hijacked flights had originated in the US. We didn’t hear from my mother-in-law until late that night when she was finally able to make a call. She was in Canada. She was there for several days until she was flown back to London.
The Mamdani and AOC clip might not be AI, but it could easily be fabricated by splicing in a cut of them taken at a different moment in the long ceremony.
I didn’t arrive at the Pentagon until the spring following 9/11. The security checkpoints. The brawny men with automatic weapons. The guard dogs sniffing as you passed by. One wonders at how quickly you acclimate to that world. Of course, I soon visited the destroyed wedge that was then under reconstruction. I could swear the smell of the charred remains lingered in the air. A number of my colleagues and commanders had been in the building that deadly day. Some fled when they saw the approaching plane through the E-ring windows and felt the blast hit behind. Others raced to the attempted rescue and recovery operations. Donald Rumsfeld was among the first in that line.
What struck me then and now, inside that still-damaged building, was how seldom those stories were told, and the ones I remember hearing were almost always one-on-one and never in a crowd. Some organizations were laser-focused on the new fight; others settled back into routine bureaucratic business; 9/11 remained ever present even when unspoken. Subsequent events must be remembered in that light. I appreciate Jerry’s grace as he recognizes how unseemly it is to chastise America for the subsequent wars from the safety of the seminar room twenty-five years later. The wars themselves merit criticism, but the context is essential to understanding those decisions. Indeed, the weight on George W. Bush’s shoulders must have been incomprehensibly immense.
For some years after 9/11, a common farewell gift for those completing Pentagon duty was a large reproduction of the iconic photo showing hard-hatted firefighters unfurling an American flag over the Pentagon wall with several soldiers in salute. Matted, framed, and signed by the colleagues with whom one served, it marked a moment that few will forget, even those of us who didn’t experience the events firsthand, yet received the photo all the same.
I remind myself that this consequential moment and its aftermath are to today’s youth more distant than Korea and Vietnam were to me. They will have their own fight. Let’s hope they won’t need to be shocked out of tribal bickering and complacency.
Rough back of envelope calculation: Based on populations and victim totals, the average Israeli is about 13x more likely to have known someone who died in the Oct 7 attack vs. a US resident to have known someone who died in 9/11.
(As it is, a college friend’s sister, Ann Campana Judge, was on the Pentagon plane.)
We were at home in Japan and saw it on television. We called our daughter who was in Brooklyn. “What? That can’t be possible. I can see the WTC from my window.” We told her to look. “Oh my god!” Then the second plane hit. The phone cut off.