Meet Me In St. Louis

Looking up at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (aka the Gateway Arch). Definitely very impressive from the outside. Also impressive? The line to get in. Depending on time of day, you could spend more time waiting in line than actually riding the elevator to the observation deck.

Inside Union Station. The station, repurposed as a hotel, is a grand space with a nightly light show. One of the more impressive public spaces in the City.

At Busch Stadium with a view of the Arch, Court House, and downtown.

A view from behind home plate.

One of the great things about St. Louis is all the public art and sculptures on display. This is part of a larger display along Market Street. 

Soulard Market is a hidden gem near the Budweiser brewery (and tours and free tastings). However, this is more likely to leave a lasting impression with a copious amount of fresh food, spices, teas, and other local delicacies. 

More of the fresh food on display.

From the top of the Gateway Arch looking West. There was a bit of haze plus the windows don't exactly give you the clearest views (and they're incredibly tiny - each one is less than a foot high and about 18 inches wide). Everyone gets wedged in tight up there trying to hunch over to get a view, let alone decent photos.

Fountains outside Union Station at night. 

More fountains outside Union Station.

The Lincoln home in Springfield, Illinois. It's where Lincoln accepted the nomination to lead the Republican Party in the 1861 presidential elections, which he won. 

We hit several stretches of Route 66 in and around St. Louis. This particular stretch was near the Lincoln National Historic Site.

Inside the State Capitol of Illinois.

Looking up at the State Capitol of Illinois.

St. Charles, Missouri. Home to the first state capitol and first capital of Missouri.

White Haven, the home owned by US Grant and where he lived prior to the Civil War. It's where he met his wife, who was from a family of slave holders. 

Inside the Budweiser Brewery.

Inside the Court House where the state's Dred Scott cases played out.

This space is recreating the look and feel of the court room at the time of the Dred Scott decision. The courtroom was originally several times larger than this.

Walking through the Old Courthouse, you could really feel the history around you. Hitting these historic sites really did give you a sense of the importance of the St. Louis environs and why events turned out the way they did - it was where US Grant got his first exposure to slavery (via his wife's family). It's where the infamous Dred Scott case worked its way through the courts on its way to an abominable decision by the Taney court, and where the nation was at a crossroads- literally and figuratively as a central point on the way West.

If you want to get a primer on civil rights and equal protection under the law, look no further than the courthouse downtown. The courtroom for Dred Scott leaves a lasting impression on those willing to learn - we are still a world away from truly having equal protection under the law, and minorities are still persecuted and not treated equally.

That goes for religious as well as ethnic minorities. So, when I hear about how Christian persecution in the US, I have to wonder what planet these people are talking about, because Christians aren’t being persecuted here - they’re being exposed to the limits of separation of church and state as the Founders wanted because no religion shall be established, which means that Christians can’t impose their views on everyone else through state acts (like legislation).

A few other observations about St. Louis in general. The food is pretty damned good. Had Imo's and Ted Drewes as well as great Italian food at a place off the beaten path. Square One distillery and brewery is a nice spot in the Lafayette neighborhood. The area's parks and recreation activities are quite nice, and there's plenty of distinctive architecture to take in.

But there was one thing I couldn't quite figure out. Why did local and state leaders think that every street, let alone highway needed more lanes of traffic? The place could have accommodated two or three times as much traffic and still had room for several times more. It's one of the most overbuilt areas for roads I've ever traveled. The area could definitely benefit from a road diet.

For these photos, I shot with my Canon 60D and either the Sigma 8-16mm, f4.5-5.6 or Sigma 17-50mm f2.8 lenses.

The Most Insane Holocaust/Nazi Analogies and References of the Year

2013 saw quite a few politicians and prominent people abusing the English language, and specifically using the absurd argument that events and actions in the present are just like what Hitler and the Nazis did during the Holocaust. It's Reductio ad Hitlerum and in the process it debases the terminology referring to the Holocaust and the Final Solution. These people have little understanding of history, let alone current events, and they conflate the two to suit their political objectives. Facts fall by the wayside. And the horror of the Holocaust is eroded in the process of making these absurd claims.

Just so we're working from the same dictionary, here are some actual facts about the Nazis.

Despite the singular nature of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, there are a whole lot of people who think that making analogies to the Holocaust is acceptable.

I've boiled the analogies down to four general themes - based mainly on the focus of the analogy.

The first deals with health care reform, otherwise known as Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act.

One particular instance in January could be treated as the most insane Holocaust analogy of the year, except that we were just getting warmed up.

According to Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll (R), Idaho should refuse to set up a state-run health exchange under Obamacare because, although the federal government is using private insurers for the time being, the Obama administration will eventually “pull the trigger” on those companies to establish a socialistic health care system.
Nuxoll posted her comments on Twitter, as well as included them in an email blast to 120 supporters:

The insurance companies are creating their own tombs. Much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps, private insurers are used by the feds to put the system in place because the federal government has no way to set up the exchange. Based on legislation and the general process that is written toward this legislation, the federal government will want nothing to do with private insurance companies. The feds will have a national system of health insurance and they will eliminate the insurance companies.

When the Idaho Spokesman-Review asked Nuxoll to clarify her comments, she doubled down on them. Nuxoll said she didn’t mean to disrespect any group of people with her analogy, and explained she said it because “I felt badly for the Jews — it wasn’t just Jews, but Jews, and Christians, and Catholics, and priests. My thing was they didn’t know what was going on. The insurance companies are not realizing what’s going to end up in their demise.”

This Idaho Republican somehow thinks that a US law that is designed to expand access to health insurance is "much like" the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people in the gas chambers and putting them on cattle cars.

And from today, we have this gem from North Carolina State Senator Bob Rucho, a Republican:

https://twitter.com/SenatorBobRucho/statuses/412200682477744128

The health care reform in the US has generated quite a few Nazi/Holocaust references over the past few years, but few things stir the Nazi references more than gun control or any kinds of firearms reforms. That's the second theme.

This too was from January, in the wake of the Sandy Hook school massacre.

One of the common forms of this nonsensical analogy is when people and organizations Tweet that if only Jews had guns they would not have had to endure the Holocaust.

https://twitter.com/thinkprogress/statuses/411502572118089728

https://twitter.com/WashTimes/status/400632608582672384

Lest we forget, the NRA's own Wayne LaPierre spreads this nonsense as well.

This would, of course, ignore facts, history, and logic. The analogy fails primarily because of the fallacy that gun control was somehow central to the rise of the Nazi party and that the lack of firearms prevented opponents from overthrowing the Nazi regime.

Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.

University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.

The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.

Just as important is the fact of the nationality of the victims of the Holocaust.
All but about 130,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis lived outside Germany. Nearly 4.5 million lived in Poland and Russia - both of which had standing armies that failed to stop the Nazi invasions of both countries. The rest lived in countries that also fell to the Nazis, including much of France, the low Countries, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Romania, or were allied with the Nazis, including Italy.

The Polish army disintegrated against the Nazis in under a month; the entire country was overrun in weeks, with the Soviets invading as well. Nearly half of all Holocaust victms lived in Poland, which had a standing army and air force protecting it.

The French army had superior equipment as compared to the Nazis, but they lost to superior tactics in under two months time. The British and Allied army remnants were thrown off the Continent at Dunkirk.

The Nazis then invaded Russia, capturing enough territory to encompass millions of Jews living there - in total, nearly 5 of the 6 million Holocaust victims were living in Russia and Poland - not in Nazi Germany.

Russia had a huge standing army, complete with tanks, planes, and division upon division of infantry.

The Soviets had a larger military than the invading Nazis by all metrics, but the Nazis had the advantage of surprise and superior tactics at the outset. The Soviet response was to trade land for time to regroup and attack.

Despite the larger numerical size of the Soviet military, it was nearly defeated and sieges were laid upon the biggest cities in the USSR - Stalingrad, Leningrad, and came within shooting distance of Moscow.

The Nazis invaded countries with large Jewish populations and with standing armies that were shattered by the Nazi invasion. No amount of individual gun ownership would have saved anyone under those circumstances. Firearms ownership is quite besides the point when an enemy country invades your country with more firepower than your own government can repel.

Also, this analogy purposefully ignores that even major Jewish uprisings like in Warsaw were eventually snuffed out and even the Warsaw ghetto was liquidated with its survivors sent to the death camps.

But more substantively, this analogy fails the smell test the moment you realize that the Nazis defeated entire armies with superior firepower, that a few German Jews (who were a minority of all Nazi victims) with guns would stand no chance.

The third insane Nazi analogy of the year deals with political procedures.

This past November, US Senator Harry Reid amended the rules regarding filibusters and Senate rules for what would allow votes on nominations to move forward. It was a procedural act to address the stalemate in the Senate and the failure to confirm presidential nominees to various postings. And yet, the rhetoric from the right included all kinds of Nazi references, with this one being just a representative sample:

The Obama NAZIS have made a power grab, and the people of the United States of America have less power today than they had yesterday. Barack Obama’s celebrating his power grab by laughing in the media right in your faces, Americans may be too dumb stupid to even know that’s what’s just happened. What’s been ripped apart is the meaning and glory of an America that once stood for something. Now the US stands for nothing. The people are made losers by their servants. An American sellout from an American President and American Senate.

That's right, the ability to limit debate so as to bring about a vote that enables those opposed to the nomination to still vote against that person is akin to a Nazi power grab. Note too that as soon as the rule was changed, votes proceeded and the formerly obstructed nominations proceeded without incident, including several on a wide bipartisan basis indicating that the purpose of the filibuster was to obstruct at all costs on the politics and not on the qualifications of those involved (the confirmation process is about advise and consent - not to block and thwart nominees on political basis alone).

A fourth kind of Nazi analogy is the slow fall into Nazism, as identified by Glenn Beck and his followers. Beck has no problems showing off his significant collection of Nazi memorabilia in Salt Lake City this past June. Beck has a warped sense of history and thinks nothing of trying to compare current events to the rise of the Nazi regime. He has no problem juxtaposing those Nazi artifacts with contemporary events/descriptions is an attempt to convince viewers that there are parallels and that we should oppose the Obama Administration at every opportunity because of the slippery slope to Nazism.

Honorable Mentions go to the following:

• MSNBC analyst Michael Eric Dyson, who in an appearance in June characterized Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s vote with the majority overturning a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as, “A symbolic Jew has invited a metaphoric Hitler to commit holocaust and genocide upon his own people.”
• Rep. Brenda Barton (R-Payson), who compared President Obama to Hiter in relation to the government shutdown that included shuttering National Parks nationwide.
• One of the leaders of the Tea Party movement, Judson Phillips, has no problem dissembling and thinking that President Obama is out to create a one-party state using both Hitlerian and Stalinist tactics.
  
• Glenn Beck makes the list again, calling New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg a Nazi. It's doubly insulting considering that Bloomberg is Jewish




• Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa said that American exceptionalism is reminiscent of Nazism “before and during World War II.
  

A person can lose count of the references uttered on Twitter and blogs and comment sections across the Internet, so I kept the references to political leaders, media figures, and other notable figures. If I were to extend this to every utterance, it would be a full time job. For just one day in January 2013, you could have this selection as among the more notable Hitler references. Cross posted at LGF.

At Least 300 Killed In Pair of Factory Fires In Pakistan

When you get a chance, take a look at the garments you own. You may see quite a few that are made in Pakistan or places like Vietnam or Bangladesh. Now understand that there are unseen costs for having clothes made on the cheap. Pakistan was wracked by a pair of deadly factory fires at a garment factory and an illegal shoe factory.

The garment factory fire in Karachi killed at least 289 people, while the shoe factory fire killed at least 25 people.

And the death tolls are rising as more bodies are removed from the carnage.

The death toll there rose to 289 people Wednesday, as firefighters battled the flames for hours, said senior government official Roshan Ali Sheikh. It was one of the worst industrial accidents in Pakistan's 65-year history, and Sheikh said the death toll could rise because rescue workers were still pulling bodies out from the site in Karachi.

Most of the deaths were caused by suffocation as people caught in the basement were unable to escape when it filled with smoke, said the top firefighter in Karachi, Ehtisham-ud-Din. There were no fire exits, and at least one of the main doors leading out was locked, he said. It's unclear what caused the fire.

Workers on higher floors of the five-story building struggled to make it out of windows that were covered with metal bars. Many were injured when they jumped from the building, including a 27-year-old pregnant woman who was injured in the fall.

Another injured factory worker, Mohammad Ilyas, speaking from the hospital, said he was working with roughly 50 other men and women on one of the floors when suddenly a fireball came from the staircase.

"I jumped from my seat as did others and rushed toward the windows, but iron bars on the windows barred us from escaping. Some of us quickly took tools and machines to break the iron bars," he said. "That was how we managed to jump out of the windows down to the ground floor."

The eyewitness and victim testimony mirrors those from our own experience in the US and New York City in particular. You could get similar testimony from those who survived the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, where 146 people, mostly immigrants, were killed because the factory operators locked egress doors and emergency exits and failed to provide a safe working environment. Lint and other flammable materials were allowed to pile up and all it took was a cigarette or match thrown into a scrap pile to cause the conflagration.

In the aftermath of the Triangle fire, New York engaged in a massive overhaul of workplace safety laws, and we are much better off for it.

One can only hope that the Pakistani government takes a similar tact.

Have We Learned Anything From the Great Blackout of 2003?

Nine years ago, the Great Blackout of 2003 struck the United States and parts of Canada from Ohio to New York. 50-60 million people were thrown into darkness, including millions in the New York City metro area. I was among those who had to figure out how to get home without subways/PATH or rail signals operating. Highways and roads were jammed because traffic signals were out.

Power was eventually restored, with the outage running as long as 30 hours in some parts of the affected area, and we learned that the outage was initially due to a transmission line in Ohio failing due to a tree falling, but the outage spread as utilities failed to contain the problems. That triggered a cascading failure across the Northeast.

The utility responsible for maintaining that Ohio transmission line failed to maintain its right of way and carry out tree trimming and other preventative actions.

Has the United States improved its transmission infrastructure to the point where we don't have to worry about another catastrophic blackout? I'm not so sure. Utilities and their regulators have improved their communications to reduce the chances that a blackout in one interconnect will affect others.

But as we've seen over just the past year, utilities have repeatedly fallen short on maintaining their utility rights of way - particularly on tree trimming. Blackouts due to Hurricane Irene, Tropical Storm Irene, and the October blizzard of 2012 all were exacerbated by utilities that failed to deal with tree trimming issues in a systematic way. Connecticut was particularly hard hit by those storms, and CLP's disastrous efforts in restoring power were hammered by state and local officials. A failure to carry out an effective tree trimming program was identified as a contributing factor.

Regulators have to do a better job in making sure that the companies are investing in the transmission grid and responding to outages in a timely manner. They have to make sure that the utilities are investing in tree trimming programs to protect their infrastructure, though that would seem like a no-brainer since it's cheaper to protect the transmission lines through a systematic tree trimming program than trying to rebuild parts of the network during a crisis. Utilities have to upgrade and invest in technologies, and that also means that rate payers have to deal with higher costs that are passed on to them.

PSE&G has been doing a better job of trying to upgrade its infrastructure; it's currently upgrading transmission lines in Rutherford and Fair Lawn as well as building out its distributed solar power system. Con Ed is also spending on its infrastructure, but with mixed results - there are perpetual concerns of brownouts and blackouts whenever the temperatures spike during the summer because the distribution system can barely keep up with demand. That has to change.

Mitt Romney Takes Idiocy To New Level

At a campaign rally in Las Vegas yesterday, presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney proposed a constitutional amendment that would make anyone who does not have a business background as ineligible for the White House as if they had been born in Kenya.

“I was speaking with one of these business owners who owns a couple of restaurants in town,” Romney said. “And he said ‘You know I’d like to change the Constitution, I’m not sure I can do it,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have a provision in the Constitution that in addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birthplace of the president being set by the Constitution, I’d like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States.‘”

Romney continued: “You see then he or she would understand that the policies they’re putting in place have to encourage small business, make it easier for business to grow.

That's right folks, he'd make someone like Dwight Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, or even recent GOP candidates like John McCain, Mike Huckabee, or Rick Santorum ineligible to run for President because they lack so-called business experience.

Of course, this comes on the heels of Romney's courting of birther Donald Trump, so this isn't all that surprising. He's pandering to the extremists and thinks this is a winning strategy to win in November. It might help solidify his base, but it wont help him sway moderates or independents on which this election will depend (as it always done).

Far from moderating his positions to pull votes from the center, it seems that Romney is sticking to the hard right.

Romney's pushing this nonsense in an attempt to sway people on the economic conditions facing the nation, but his business experience isn't exactly the most sterling example of job creation. Bain Capital - the venture capital firm where he worked - was interested in making money for the firm - not job creation. Jobs were frequently killed in acquisitions and consolidations made by the firm. Creative destruction to be sure - someone made money on the transactions, but it doesn't help create jobs by shuttering factories.

Anne Frank Latest Holocaust Victim To Be Baptized By Mormon Church in Violation of Agreements

A group of Mormons have once again attempted to baptize-by-proxy Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who hid in an Amsterdam attic before being caught by Nazis and ended up dying in a concentration camp.

The rite was conducted Saturday in a Mormon temple in the Dominican Republic, according to Helen Radkey, an excommunicated church member turned whistleblower.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practices proxy Baptism — converting Jews, Christians and Muslims to the faith years after they died by ritually dunking a stand-in for the deceased.

Radkey has revealed that Mormons posthumously baptized thousands of people, including Joan of Arc, Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe and Barack Obama’s mother.

Fury over the discovery in 1995 that the church had turned more than 300,000 Jews killed by Nazis for their faith into Mormons led the LDS church to promise to quit baptizing Holocaust victims.

In a statement Tuesday, the church said it was considering taking disciplinary action.

“It is distressing when an individual willfully violates the Church’s policy and something that should be understood to be an offering based on love and respect becomes a source of contention,” the church said.

Frank, who died at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen death camp after writing her famous diary, has been baptized by the Mormon church at least nine times before, according to Radkey.

Last week, the Mormon church apologized for posthumously baptizing the parents of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. His mother was killed in a death camp in 1942.

This is just the latest incident in a long string of baptisms of Jews who died in the Holocaust by members of the Mormon church. Church leaders have repeatedly claimed that this was done by rogue elements in the Church, but there was a prior incident where they entered into an agreement:

Church officials, in response, stated that the Church does not teach that vicarious baptisms coerce deceased persons to become Mormons, nor does the Church add those names to its list of Church members.[52][53] Church officials have also stated that, in accordance with the 1995 agreement, it has removed more than 300,000 names of Jewish Holocaust victims from its databases, as well as subsequently removing names later identified by Jewish groups. Church officials have also stated that a new version of the database, New FamilySearch, has been developed and is currently being implemented that would help prevent the submission of Holocaust victim names for temple ordinances.[54]

Despite the agreement, they're still at it. What makes the practice all the more galling is that these Mormon groups are specifically targeting Holocaust victims - Jews who were specifically murdered or condemned to concentration camps precisely because they were Jewish.

The Truth Emerges About Iconic World War II Photo

An iconic photo that has been published countless times in relation to the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks may not be all that it's cracked up to be. MSNBC has apparently gotten to the bottom of a photo depicted a group of women firefighters at Pearl Harbor.

It turns out that while there were indeed women firefighters who were tasked with that arduous duty, according to one of the women, the photograph was not taken during the day of the attacks.

Lowe said the wartime photo was certainly not taken on Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Imperial Japanese Navy shocked the United States into joining World War II. On that Sunday morning she was headed to church when the bombing started, and she went ahead anyway because she wasn't sure what else to do. But she and her friends from the Dole pineapple factory did soon go to work as civilian workers at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, and one of their duties was to fight fires. She said the photo was probably taken at a training exercise during the war. She said she had no idea that her photo was in history books.

So the bottom line: These women were female firefighters at Pearl Harbor, the place. To that extent the photo is authentic. But they weren't fighting a fire when this photograph was taken, and they weren't fighting any fires on Dec. 7, the day we remember every year on Pearl Harbor Day. In addition to Lowe's account, there is strong documentary evidence that this is a Navy publicity photo taken to showcase the roles of women during the war.

Happy Birthday NYC Subways!

On this day in 1904, the NYC subway system opened its first line.

It is now the nation's largest transit system (carrying more passengers than nearly all other transit systems in the nation combined, and that separates out the SI Railway which is part of the MTA and PATH, which runs service in and out of Manhattan).

The MTA subways are the 6th most used system in the world (Tokyo is first), but it has more stations and track miles than nearly every other system on that list.

Since that first line in 1904, the system has grown by leaps and bounds, but no new transit lines have been built in decades. That's changing with the construction of the 2d Avenue Subway, which is actually a long-overdue replacement of an elevated subway line that ran along much of 2d Avenue until it was torn down.

The 7 Line is getting a needed extension to the far West Side, and may eventually burrow across the Hudson River to join up with the Secaucus Transit hub and NJ Transit.

There's lots of other work to be done, but the complexity of the system and that it operates 24/7/365 means that work that other systems could carry out overnight has to be staggered in such a way that it increases the time to complete. Such is the benefit and cost of running such a massive system.

One can only hope that the local and state politicians do a better job of supporting mass transit and the subway system, which remains the heart that pumps the New York City economy.

9/11: Ten Years Later

It was literally a bolt from the blue. The skies over New York City were a crisp bright blue with nary a cloud in a sky. It was a morning full of promise.

New Yorkers were heading to the polls to vote on the next mayor of the city. People were talking baseball and the upcoming football season. All while the region was stirring for the day ahead, al Qaeda's terrorists were already on board four jets bound for New York and Washington DC and had already overpowered the crews.

I was on a NJ Transit train with my dad when I first noticed something wrong at the WTC out of the corner of my eye; it was smoke coming from the upper reaches of the tower.

It was just around 8:45.

The world changed, and I didn't quite realize it.

People watching the morning news didn't know it either at first. But they would soon be glued to broadcasts that showed the horrors of the worst terror attacks ever perpetrated.

The damage done on that morning was nearly impossible to comprehend. In the mere blink of the eye, nearly 3,000 people were condemned to death and the World Trade Center would soon be reduced to a pile of rubble that burned for weeks on end. But the death rattle of the Twin Towers would continue for nearly two hours and victims trapped above the fires had to make the choice to stay and choke on the heat and smoke or jump to a certain death. All too many make that decision to jump. Firefighters on the ground also succumbed before the towers fell - falling debris hitting firefighters and fleeing people alike.

Victim Number One would be there to comfort those who fell. Rev. Mychal Judge of the FDNY was comforting fallen firefighters and office workers alike when he was struck and killed by debris. So many people inside the Department and around the City thought so highly of him that he was honored as the first victim of the attacks - so that he could comfort and aid all those many others who were murdered on that day - to guide them to Heaven.

All too many would unfortunately follow him - and not by their own choice.

Lower Manhattan was engulfed in smoke and debris as the towers fell. Emergency personnel, still choking on the dust that would swirl through Lower Manhattan for days and weeks to come, quickly moved to seek to help those who may have been trapped beneath all the rubble. They formed bucket brigades, moving debris a handful at a time. Occasionally, the remains of a victim would be discovered and crews would solemnly remove the remains.

There were moments of heroism all around, and not just from emergency personnel. MTA subway workers made important decisions independent of their superiors to evacuate passengers from areas around the World Trade Center saving countless lives in the process.

Emergency personnel would be at Ground Zero around the clock for weeks on end before officials would claim that the site had officially been cleared of remains. Many of them would later become ill from the effects of breathing in all the dust and debris that was pulverized by the collapsing towers, and it is one of the sadder chapters from 9/11 that we are still burying victims of the attacks to this day, including James Zadroga (even as some medical experts dispute that Zadroga died of exposure at Ground Zero.

People who risked their lives to save others and to help families who lost loved ones find remains of the victims are themselves victims of the attacks. The Zadroga Act isn't perfect by any means and it has come too late for some, but it's a start to compensate and aid families of responders who are suffering from all manner of ailments (but not cancer to this point) attributed to Ground Zero exposure.

We cannot allow petty political differences prevent the delivery of critical aid to these emergency personnel and those who selflessly strode into the unknown to help provide rescue and recovery from the debris of Ground Zero all while environmental agencies proclaimed the air was safe to breathe - it wasn't.

Even after the fires were being put out and officials claimed that the site had been cleared of remains, it turns out that victims' remains would be discovered months and even years thereafter on buildings surrounding Ground Zero including the rooftop of the former Deutsche Bank building. The death toll, which was once feared to be more than we could bear - in the tens of thousands, would eventually drop to around 2,742 at the World Trade Center. That count may rise once again as more and more emergency personnel working at Ground Zero succumb to ailments attributed to exposures at Ground Zero.

Efforts to quench the pile and enable crews to begin searching for remains was an all but impossible task in the immediate aftermath of the attacks since most of the water mains in the area were destroyed by the collapsing towers. That meant that the heavy lifting had to be carried out by FDNY fireboats supported by the John J. Harvey, a retired fireboat with a civilian crew. The Harvey, alongside the city's two active fireboats pumped water nearly continuously over the next several days as crews raced to repair fire hydrants to get more water on the fires. Just a few years earlier, the Harvey was set to be scrapped but for the new owners who restored the boat.

Since then, the City has received funds to buy new fireboats, and there are reports of teething problems since the two fireboats (The 343 - in honor of the 343 firefighters killed on 9/11 and the Firefighter II) were christened on September 10, 2010.

Thomas Franklin, the Record's photographer who caught perhaps the most famous photo after the collapse (the firefighters raising an American flag that harkened back to the famous Iwo Jima flag raising) has put together a series of photos and recollections of his own along with other photographers who were witnesses to history.



Video footage has encompassed nearly every aspect of the attacks, but every now and then new footage shows up that presents a different vantage of the attacks.

Even nearly 10 years after the attacks, new footage has come to light as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request for NYPD footage taken from a helicopter circling the World Trade Center in the critical moments before the towers collapsed. That video mirrors photos taken by NYPD Aviation Unit Detective Greg Semendinger, who took more than 300 photos (film and digital) during the course of the day. NIST released those photos in 2010 as part of another FOIA request.

More recently, FEMA released video taken on 9/11 and the rescue efforts beneath the fallen World Trade Center, including investigating tunnels, the PATH station, the shopping mall, and other areas for survivors or victims.



And then, just in the past week, new video has surfaced from Shanksville, Pennsylvania, showing the smoke plume from when Flight 93 crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers rose to fight off the hijackers and crashed the plane into the countryside rather than allow the terrorists to fly into their presumed target, which was either the Capitol building or the White House.



The National Flight 93 Memorial is being dedicated on Saturday and opening to the public on Sunday, after temporary memorials marked the spot where Flight 93 crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers learned the fate of the other hijacked airliners and chose to fight than see another national landmark attacked.


Coming full circle, just this past May 1, 2011, the world learned that the United States finally caught up with Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. In a daring raid on a compound near Pakistan's military academy, US special forces killed bin Laden and captured a treasure trove of intel that will help the intelligence community and military plan further campaigns against the terrorists who did so much damage. 

Yet, all those events of this past May and the celebration and reflection pale in comparison to what happened on that fateful day and the nearly 3,000 people murdered across New York, Washington DC at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Here are remembrances of a few of those killed on 9/11, as written by my friend legalbgl for Project 2,996:
Captain Patrick J. Brown (2010).
Hagay Shefi (2009).
Alison Marie Wildman (2008).
Daniel Thomas Afflito (2007).

In addition to all the people who will be sorely missed, we also lost a cultural touchstone when the Twin Towers came down. From the moment they poked out over the surrounding skyscrapers and raced towards the sky, Hollywood used them as a backdrop on everything from a remake of King Kong to a montage/cut scene for the television show Friends. The following video shows a bunch of movies that included the towers in the fore- or background:

Twin Tower Cameos from Dan Meth on Vimeo.

(Special thanks to Donna Grunewald for her extensive list) http://wtcinmovies.tripod.com/chrono.html

Here's another video, from the movie Godspell, which concludes atop the still under construction WTC:


The band Depeche Mode even did a video Enjoy the Silence atop the outdoor observation deck at the WTC.

Even today, there are movies being released that reference the Twin Towers or use footage relating to the Towers.

Like all those killed on 9/11, the towers will be missed even if they were not the architectural gems that critics wished for. They were meant to be impressive and to impress upon the sky a sense of grandeur and permanence. What we had for 10 years was a profound sense of absence, and its successor with 1WTC will recapture only part of that.

We will have a new memorial and we will have new skyscrapers and architectural and engineering wonders at Ground Zero.

And yet, the site will always be tinged with sadness.

The skyline will never be the same.

Neither will our hearts, which are heavy with the loss and supreme sacrifices made on 9/11 by the rescue personnel who bravely rushed up the towers even as people were racing to get out of the towers or gasping as people were forced to jump to their deaths to avoid being burned alive in the fires that racked the towers.

For my prior year recollections and postings, see September 11, 2010, September 11, 2009,  September 11, 2008, September 11, 2007, September 11, 2006, and September 11, 2005.

Competition For Displaying Retiring Space Shuttles In Home Stretch

NASA is expected to announce the three museums that will have the honor of displaying one of the three surviving space shuttles on April 12, which is the 30th anniversary of the first flight by a shuttle (Columbia) into space.

The Intrepid Sea Air Space museum is among the hopefuls, and they've got an online petition with more than 150,000 signatures. Others include the Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, the Museum of Flight, the US Air Force Museum, and California Science Center in Los Angeles. 21 organizations have submitted applications, so there are going to be a lot of disappointed museum curators and space aficionados around the nation.

Key to any bid is that the winning museums must provide a climate controlled environment for the shuttle as well as other educational displays. NASA doesn't want to repeat the mistakes it made with its displays of Apollo equipment, which was left exposed to the elements and caused significant corrosion and decay.

For the Intrepid, this would mean building an enclosure on Pier 86 adjacent to the aircraft carrier and its exhibition of aircraft and spacecraft. This is a view of the Intrepid's mockup of a shuttle on display at Pier 86:

It's expected that Discovery will end up at the Smithsonian, which means that the two remaining shuttles - Endeavor and Atlantis will split between the remaining 20 sites. Each of the winning bids will have to provide nearly $30 million to NASA for preparing the shuttles for public display, including decontamination of propellant and other changes.

Another aspect that NASA will take into account is the number of people who would visit the shuttles, and gain exposure to the shuttle program, space exploration, and be inspired by such exposure in the future.

The Intrepid site would be an ideal platform, with millions of school kids in the NYC metro area, the largest tourist destination in the US, and a central location in Manhattan.

Mississippi Ponders License Plates Honoring First Grand Wizard of KKK?

All states have vanity plates and specialty plates honoring everything from favorite sports teams to various social causes. In Mississippi, that extends to the Sons of the Confederacy, and they're hoping to have a plate honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest.

If Forrest's name rings a bell, it should.

He was among the key leaders in the Ku Klux Klan and served as its first Grand Wizard.

A new civil war is brewing in Mississippi over a proposal to put a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard on state license plates.

Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, notorious for leading a massacre of black Union soldiers and leading the KKK in its early days, would appear on the plates in 2014 if the group Sons of Confederate Veterans gets its way.

The organization is sponsoring a series of specialty plates over the next four years to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

This year's plate features the last home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

The state's chapter of the NAACP strongly criticized the call to honor Forrest, who led several battles in Mississippi during the war.

"He should be viewed in the same light that we view Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden," Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP in Mississippi, told The Associated Press, adding that the Klan was a "terrorist group."

"The state of Mississippi should deny any vanity tags which would highlight racial hatred in this state," he said.

He served as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and was accused of war crimes for allowing his troops to massacre hundreds of black Union troops and Union loyalist troops after the Battle of Fort Pillow.

He has no place being honored on a license plate.

Holiday Greetings From Apollo 8

This is video shot by the crew of Apollo 8, which was in orbit around the moon during Christmas 1968. It's a shame that we have not been back to the moon in 40 years because of what we could learn.

Blast From the Past

The Museum of the City of New York has a fascinating collection of historical photos from around the City that sheds light onto life from a bygone era.

Among the photos that caught my attention was the construction of the New York Times headquarters in Times Square (formerly Longacre Square).

It's quite the contrast from what Times Square looks like now. 

The full collection can be viewed here. Photographic collections include works by Jacob Riis.

Sons of Confederacy Upset History Channel Wont Accept Their Ads

The History Channel used to provide accurate history without such nonsense as UFO stories and revisionist tales and psychobabble. Now, tales of psychics, end times, paranormal activities, and other such blatherings are regular fare. So, with that in mind the Sons of the Confederacy hoped to get an advertisement to run in conjunction with the 150th anniversary about how the start of the Civil War was not about slavery, but about Northern aggression and violated states' rights.

The History Channel refused to run the spot, and the Sons of the Confederacy complained. Indeed, the Sons of the Confederacy tried to claim that because the channel regularly promotes and runs stories about the paranormal and revisionist history programs that they were entitled to have their spot run. They claim that the channel is being politically correct. The channel replies:

We have informed them that the ad is outside the scope of our guidelines and may not be aired during any of our programming. AETN’s advertising guidelines, which are similar to those of other broadcast and cable networks, do not permit such an ad as explained above. Indeed, AETN is not aware of any other network who has accepted or aired the ad.To our knowledge, it is not currently running on any of our networks, including History.

Slavery was a big reason why the war ensued - the Southern states sought to retain one of their few economic drivers - the source of labor that worked the fields and engaged in the heavy labor associated with farming. Moreover, claiming that Confederates fought to defend that right when Union forces “invaded” to prevent secession ignores the fact that it was the South that fired the first shots against the Union at Fort Sumter. Indeed, troops from The Citadel fired shots on Union ships attempting to resupply the Fort prior to the actual first battle of the Civil War.

US Slams Palestinian Nonsensical Claims, But Ignores Underlying Reality

It's nice the Obama Administration recognizes the craziness of Palestinian Authority claims that Jews do not have any historical claims to the Western Wall and Temple Mount.

The State Department said the US rejects the claim as "factually incorrect, insensitive and highly provocative." Spokesman P.J. Crowley said statements of that kind damage US efforts to revive stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and could incite violence.

"We have repeatedly raised with the Palestinian Authority leadership the need to consistently combat all forms of de-legitimization of Israel, including denying historic Jewish connections to the land," he told reporters.

"As the United States has long maintained, the status of Jerusalem must be resolved in final status negotiations between the parties," Crowley said. "We recognize that Jerusalem is a deeply important issue to Israelis and Palestinians, to Jews, to Muslims and to Christians everywhere."

Last week, a senior Palestinian official endorsed a study stating that the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray, is Muslim property and has no link to Judaism. The study has drawn fierce criticism in Israel but Al-Mutawakil Taha, deputy Palestinian information minister, said the document is the official position of the Palestinian Authority.

That bit about damaging the peace process is typical diplomatic speak. The truth is that these claims show exactly how and why Israel lacks a partner in the peace process and that until Palestinians accept Israel and a Jewish state at that, there will be no peace. The US can't broker a peace deal when one side - the Palestinians - refuse Israel's very existence and rights to the land.

As this is the official position of the Palestinian Authority it shows that the Palestinians are interested only in revisionist history to suit their propaganda purposes and de-legitimize more than 3,000 years of Jewish ties to Israel and Jerusalem.

What this shows is that despite the overwhelming evidence against Israel having a partner in peace, the US diplomatic corps will continue engaging in pseudoreality to try to keep a nonexistent peace process alive. It's time for the US and the rest of the world to stop with the charade and expose the Palestinian Authority for what it is - and that includes it not operating with the best interests of Palestinians in mind either.

On My Nightstand: The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents

The upheaval in Europe during the mid-18th Century led many to consider radically new political theories and some urged violent regime change for both republics and monarchies. This culminated with bombings, assassinations, and waves of terror throughout Europe, including the streets of Paris, London, and St. Petersburg.

Alex Butterworth catalogs the history and puts together a sordid tale of anarchists, schemers, dreamers, malcontents, and agent provocateurs who took advantage of the upheaval for their own ends, in his The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents

Various groups managed to assassinate an American President (McKinley), various Russian officials including Tzar Alexander II, and countless others. Despite the horrifying damage, these groups didn't succeed in spreading their message, but others rose in their place using some of the same propaganda tactics to overthrow existing regimes and implement their own.

The methods used to counter the terrorism are also quite familiar, and indeed many of the counterterrorism tactics were developed in this period.

It's also interesting to read how many of these disenchanted groups locked in on the time-tested tactic of blaming world Jewry for the world's woes- pogroms and genocide would follow later.

Conservative Bloggers Rate 25 Worst Figures In American History

John Hawkins sent out a link to the results of a poll of conservative bloggers and who they thought were the 25 worst figures in American history. Hawkins posted the results here, and further says that he doesn't agree with the outcome in his email announcing the results.

The results (culled from 43 bloggers):

23) Saul Alinsky (7)
23) Bill Clinton (7)
23) Hillary Clinton (7)
19) Michael Moore (7)
19) George Soros (8)
19) Alger Hiss (8)
19) Al Sharpton (8)
13) Al Gore (9)
13) Noam Chomsky (9)
13) Richard Nixon (9)
13) Jane Fonda (9)
13) Harry Reid (9)
13) Nancy Pelosi (9)
11) John Wilkes Booth (10)
11) Margaret Sanger (10)
9) Aldrich Ames (11)
9) Timothy McVeigh (11)
7) Ted Kennedy (14)
7) Lyndon Johnson (14)
5) Benedict Arnold (17)
5) Woodrow Wilson (17)
4) The Rosenbergs (19)
3) Franklin Delano Roosevelt (21)
2) Barack Obama (23)
1) Jimmy Carter (25)

This wouldn't be my list. It's way too soon to tell if President Obama is worthy of being on the list. His signature accomplishments haven't even been fully enacted yet and only time will tell if that happens in the form as originally constituted.

You've got truly treacherous figures like Ames, the Rosenbergs, Arnold, who correctly deserve to be on the list. John Wilkes Booth deserves to be on the list.

It's notable that FDR came up as often as it did, considering that his policies helped win WWII. It was his foresight that saw the US begin to build up its paltry military capabilities, Lend Lease, and set in motion the Manhattan Project that helped end WWII. There were multiple problems with his court packing scheme, and vast expansion of the Executive, but that too is a failing of Congress to limit his powers. Every president since FDR has benefited from FDR's vision for the Office of the President.

On My Nightstand: The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution

If you're reading this post, you're quite likely doing so from a battery-powered laptop or portable device. Such is the nature of the technologically driven world in which we live. We need batteries to do pretty much anything. How we came to depend on these devices is a truly interesting story and The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger is a gripping tale of the people who helped unlock the secrets of electricity, batteries, and the technologies that drive our modern world.

Honoring Terrorists

The mastermind of the Munich Olympics terrorist attack, Mohammed Oudeh, not only gets a heroes burial in Syria where he'd lived for decades, but honorifics from rival terrorist organizations.

Mr. Oudeh oversaw the plans of the raid, in which eight Palestinian militants belonging to the Black September group broke into a dormitory at the Olympic village where Israeli athletes were sleeping and took them hostage in the early morning of Sept. 5, 1972. Two of the athletes, a weightlifter and a wrestling coach, tried to overpower the militants, and were shot and killed.

The militants ended up with nine hostages, whom they said they would release in exchange for 200 Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel.

Israel refused to negotiate and a standoff ensued for 20 hours, while static television images of an empty balcony on a gray, modern dormitory transfixed the world. The Israeli hostages and their Palestinian captors were eventually transported by helicopters to a military airfield, where they had been promised to be flown to Cairo. Instead, West German sharpshooters tried to rescue the Israelis, setting off a gun battle in which five Palestinians, a German police officer and the nine hostages were killed.

“I am proud of my father,” Mr. Oudeh’s daughter, Wafa Oudeh, said in a phone interview from Damascus, shortly after his burial in the section of a cemetery reserved for martyrs to the Palestinian cause. “As a father he was a special person. He was emotional and generous. He was devoted to his family and to Palestine. His death is like a mountain collapsing.”

In addition to Ms. Oudeh, he is survived by his wife, four other daughters, and a son.

Amin Maqboul, secretary general of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, the Palestine Liberation Organization faction to which Mr. Oudeh belonged, praised him as “a fighter of the highest order.”

Hamas, Fatah’s rival, released a statement mourning Mr. Oudeh.

The Islamists and terrorists just love to honor mass murdering terrorists. He was responsible for murdering athletes at the Olympics in images that are an indelible image of those Olympics.



Note too that this was a terrorist associated with Fatah and the PLO as one of its offshoots. Not only does Fatah recognize and memorialize this murderer, but Fatah's rival Hamas also takes time out from their internecine conflict to honor the murderer.

Meanwhile, a CNN reporter in Lebanon not only notes the death of a Hizbullah spiritual leader Muhammad Hussein Fadl-Allah, but mourns the loss. Classy.

Hizbullah Applauds Helen Thomas' Raving Rant

It comes as no surprise that Hizbullah applauds Helen Thomas' disgusting revisionist history rant about Israel and telling the Jews to go back to Poland and Germany as the solution for Palestine.



For that, Hizbullah salutes Helen Thomas.

Thomas engages in revisionist history. She ignores the multi-generational connection between Jews and the land of Israel - that stretches back more than 3,000 years of documented history. In fact, it ignores the reason that Jews were forced to flee Germany and Poland (and indeed all of Europe at one time or another not including the Nazi Holocaust that occurred before and during World War II or the rampant anti-Semitism that prevent Jews from resettling in much of Germany and Poland (for those Jewish refugees that survived the genocide that is)). It ignores the Jews that were forced to flee from the Arab world and the refusal of countries like the US or Britain to accept Jewish refugees - instituting quotas including during World War II that directly led to deaths of Jews seeking to flee the Holocaust.

In fact, Jewlicious does the job for me and goes through the history lesson that Thomas seeks to rewrite. She goes through the thousands of years of history and persecution that requires Jews to flee everywhere they seek to live - ending up in Israel because they were out of options - and that Israel was their historic home all along - the place they turned their eyes to every day during prayer and on which they hoped for return all the days of their lives.

It's little wonder that Hizbullah applauds Thomas; they're two peas in a pod.