I almost forgot about 9/11 this week. Mostly because I’m so tired I’m barely walking (last day of packing at the old house G-d willing, and I’m starting late, because it’s been that kind of day.) and looking at the computer has been sporadic, so I lost track of the date.
It’s not because I forgot about 9/11, because I can’t. There are points in my life where inflections happened, dividing who I was before and who I was after.
Some of them are happy, like my wedding, or holding my baby boys in my arms for the first time, the day my first story was accepted. Some are sad and deeply personal, like the day my grandmother died, the day our first cat died (I swear before that we treated them as though they were immortal,) others too personal to tell. Then there are sad/tragic and universal. Not personal at all, because I wasn’t one of the victims, but the days changed my understanding of the world. I understand that Kennedy’s assassination was this for some of the people ten years older than I.
For me the two of those that stand out (we’re not going to talk about Portuguese events. Whole different ball of wax. I expect different things there for reasons that should be obvious) are 9/11 and 10/7.
Both were days when something happened far away to people I’d never met that broke me internally and made me into someone I couldn’t imagine a day before. (Though the full effect took time to play out, honestly.)
I will never again be the woman who got up on that clear, sunny day in September 25 years ago, dressed her kids, fed them, took them to school and came home to make coffee.
From the moment I answered the phone call from my then bff saying “Turn on the TV, turn on the TV” the world became a place I’d never have imagined before. And I became someone else to live in it.
For about a month after 9/11, I was so deeply traumatized that I had to engage in daydreams of being someone else completely different, just to go to sleep. I can’t quite make sense of it, but I used to day dream I was 15 years younger and a college student, born in the US. Why this was soothing, I don’t know. Perhaps the intuition that something had gone upside down, we’d tumbled down the wrong leg of the pants of time and it could never be fixed and everything I was and everything I’d done was now wrong.
I miss that mid-thirties woman with the young kids, the wide circle of artsy friends and the glib Libertarian opinions. I don’t know if she’d approve of me, though. And I know she’ll never come back.
I’m not going to rehash what happened immediately after. I’m not going to rehash how we got here. I’m sure the America of right after 9/11 would be horrified at commie Mamdani, though. Or maybe not. We were still clinging to the tolerant nineties then.
I’m not going to talk about the day, though you’re more than welcome to, though I want to remember the heroes of flight 93 that showed us we can fight back in the middle of horror, and as always I want to remember Rick Rescorla, both because we had friends in common (Weirdly some of my friends in the Austen fandom group owed their life to him) and because he’s a personal hero. G-d give us the courage to die like Rick, if the time comes for us, leading the helpless and lost to life, still trying, still fighting.
Which is my answer to those of you who are black-pilling. Yes, the “War on Terror” was botched, and honestly, was always going to be. Who we were on 9/11 couldn’t have got us a different result. Yes, the borders were open and there are a lot of outright terrorists among us.
But it’s still a minority, thank G-d. And we’re finally — finally — fighting back against the poison pill fed to this country all the way back to Woodrow Wilson.
Is it guaranteed we’ll win?
Eh. I think we already won, simply because their system can’t work and ours does. And because tech is actually going our way, from centralized to distributed. But that doesn’t mean victory is tomorrow. It doesn’t guarantee it’s in our life times, even. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee it will be quick and painless or no lives will be lost.
The world is going through major changes, and changes are always lubricated in blood and death. Note I’m not saying that I want them or that they SHOULD happen. Only that they always does. The industrial revolution caused the French revolution and all the blood and death of the twentieth century.
So the world won’t turn into paradise, and blood and death are part of the human condition. That’s something that young woman learned 25 years ago.
But heroism and the ability to fight back are part of the human condition too. Evil gets a vote but so do we.
And it is our right, our very great privilege, to stand in front of evil and say “Not through me, you don’t. Over my dead body.”
And to pay that price sometimes.
Say a prayer for the souls lost that day, if you are the praying kind. Take a minute and look at the (unbelievably clear and bright where I am) skies above.
Take a deep breath. Then go back to your own fight.
It’s what we owe the heroes of 9/11.
According To Hoyt 
I appreciate you, today more than ever.
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I hope that you’re right, that we have already won.
But I look at long-term politicians, and remember that they have the power AND TENDENCY to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.
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Don’t confuse victory with there can never be another challenge.
That’s the flaw of evil; we don’t need to adopt it.
Good is a growing thing. It takes constant care.
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I had worked a late shift the night before and woke up late.
I turned on my computer and learned about it.
My first response was “is this a computer hoax?”
Obviously, it wasn’t.
I remember going in early to the convivence store/gas station where I worked.
I remember the “run on gas for cars”.
I remember my emotional numbness.
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I heard about the first tower on the radio on the way to work. At first I thought they were rehashing the 1993 World Trade Center garage bombing. Then I found out what was happening.
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I was at work and one of my coworkers popped by my cubical and said a plane had just flown into one of the world trade center buildings. We trooped down to the conference room and watched the second plane plow into the tower. All I could do was shake my head and say, “Tom Clancy was right.”
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I saw that a plane had collided with the tower online and assumed it was a little plane. Still didn’t want to deal and went to eat a late breakfast.
Then my sister called me from work and told me to turn on the TV.
I keenly remember how they were talking about a plane going down in PA, and that there was no known connection — and then Jerry Pournelle posted a letter from the father of one of the men. People asked him whether he had contacted the news. And all at once, all the rumors were more credible.
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Saw it written online. Did not actually see it, of course.
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The Industrial Revolution also caused Marx and Engels. 😡
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“The Industrial Revolution also caused Marx and Engels.”
Karl Marx was a tick, hanging off the ear of the Industrial Revolution, sucking it’s blood. Engels was a simp, he did all the work while Marx drank in Paris bars.
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Marx was a cankerous soul consumed with envy. The timing and his connections allowed what might have been petty evil in any other era to become absolutely monstrous.
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A *lazy* *degenerate* cankerous soul consumed with envy.
*shudder*
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The Pearl Harbor of my generation.
I wish we had gone to war with that attitude, not “Islam is a religion of peace.”
There shouldn’t be two stones standing one atop the other in the Islamic world today.
Sorry if that’s out there, but it’s how I feel, even 25 years later.
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“Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.“
ADM William Halsey Jr., upon returning to Pearl Harbor after the 7 December 1941 attack by the IJN.
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IMNSHO, you’re still right. But we were going into that with one hand tied behind our back from our 1st Amendment protections for all religions, the other hand tied behind our back because 99.9999% of Americans didn’t understand that Islam is much more than JUST a religion, and the gripping hand tied between our legs because most of our elected officials have the spines of a jellyfish when it comes to actually having to fight for real.
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Aye, it’s going to be touch for people to realize that it’s a religion of pieces, frequently disassembling at ballistic levels.
It brings to mind the Star Trek related joke: Q: “Why are there no M@slims in Star Trek?” A: “Because it’s a story about the future.” [Too bad Communism didn’t get written out post ST-TOS.]
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I had been laid off as part of the dot-com implosion, added to the fact that the semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley decided (or were persuaded) to move production to various places across the Pacific. As I recall, Sept 1 was my first day unemployed, and by 9/11 I had done a resume and was (generally fruitlessly) sending out copies. So, the first part of the day was to fire up the computer, check the web comics, and start looking at the job info.
I got to User Friendly one of the three main strips I followed: After Y2K and Sluggy Freelance were the others. (Still read Sluggy, a rabbit with a switchblade and a 1911 is worth reading.) Illiad expressed sympathy for Americans. WTH? Turned on the TV in time for the second plane. Ochit.
$SPOUSE still gets dusty-eye syndrome with Alan Jackson’s “Where were you when the world stopped turning?” Me, I prefer Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.” We both agree that parts of the Middle East should be fodder for highly unusual glassware… Geiger Glassware FTW!
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And that last was supposed to be a stand-alone comment. WPDE.
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I like Leonard Cohen’s On That Day They Wounded New York.
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The context of “Mohamad Ali” style African-American-Islam is a major aspect.
I didn’t grow up around this, but–here in Des Moines, the BLM “protests” went along Seattle lines, other than our cops having a freaking BRAIN and getting the bricks removed.
But when the rubber hit the road?
The Mohammad Ali/Cassius Clay style American “Islam” grabbed the terrorists by the … arms.. and dragged them right to the cops they had attacked.
The bussed in attackers had gone right in the middle of the “Des Moines Islamic” whatever the heck, and… it didn’t go well.
You’ve heard folks talk about how Islam needs to have some kind of a reformation?
It already exists.
It’s just not the .. individuals… taking power in the middle east.
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To hell with Islam. I despise that ideology.
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The thing about the “Islam is a religion of peace” bit is that it needed to be the carrot next to a very big stick.
The unspoken part needed to be, “Islam is a religion of peace. Or at least, it better be. Because if it’s not, if we get word that there are any Imams at your mosque encouraging people to build bombs…well, some of those bombs may end up in your own basement, and they may ‘accidentally’ go off and blow you all sky high during Friday prayers.
“Oh, and when we blow up the mosques of those who are ‘slandering Islam’ by claiming it encourages violence—something that it clearly doesn’t, right?—well, you’d better be cheering louder than any Christian, Jew, or atheist at the cleansing of impure elements of your religion. Else you just might get a chance to find out personally if Allah really is offering a harem to every Islamic martyr…”
I don’t think Bush was necessarily wrong not to declare Islam the enemy. But he needed to make it very clear that there was “good, peaceful” Islam and “evil, violent” Islam, and that any Muslim who got on the wrong side of that divide was in for a very bad day.
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One problem is that a lot of the ‘non-violent’ and ‘non-radical’ Moslems don’t stay that way once there are enough of them concentrated in one place. At which point you’d be hard pressed to identify the ‘real’ radicals. Reference: the ‘peaceful’ Palestinians joining in the festivities on October 7th 2023. Other ‘peaceful’ Moslems dancing in the streets after September 11 2001.
They call us ‘infidels’. Lying to us is not just allowed, it’s a religious sacrament to them.
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The ‘90s may have been tolerant in an “end of history” hallucinogenic fog sort of way, but even on 9/10 predicting a communist mayor of NYC would have been too close to the traumatizing fall of the USSR to be remotely believable – communism was just an odd old thing of the past, why, even the Chinese were going capitalist!
And after 9/11, a shia muslim communist mayor of NYC in 25 years? Hah! What a joke!
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Traumatizing for the true believers – for everyone else it was the final long chance to release that last held breath you didn’t realize you were holding, as an implacable deadly enemy, even if the Red Army was not really all 9 foot tall supersoldiers, dissolving into dust.
On 9/11 the fall of the USSR was less than ten years in the past.
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“And after 9/11, a shia muslim communist mayor of NYC in 25 years?”
You can practically see the gears turning in the Big Machine. It’s like a page out of 1984.
This is why I mentioned Covid. Did the people of New York City -really- vote in a #MooseLimb commie as mayor?
Really?
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“It’s not because I forgot about 9/11, because I can’t. There are points in my life where inflections happened, dividing who I was before and who I was after.”
Points of inflection, yes indeed. When you can discern that the world changed, right then.
One of few, for me. 9/11, when we learned we have enemies, and what they are willing to do. Or Covid, when we learned the enemy lives among us and runs our governments, answering the question we’ve always had about why more wasn’t done after 9/11.
9/11 was more enraging, more shocking. Covid was deeper and more profound.
But on reflection, it wasn’t the world that changed. It’s always been like that. It was me that changed.
Now I ask, what else don’t I know about the world?
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What am I not doing that I really should be doing?
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And a number of people looked at the actions of their fellow travelers on the left, thought “What the heck is WRONG with these people!?” and belatedly realized that they might just be *gasp* conservatives.
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“Yes, the borders were open and there are a lot of outright terrorists among us.”
I’m unsure how I feel about this.
On the one hand, they’re here. Little cells of them, beavering away at whatever their dim little minds can manage.
On the other hand, they’re here. Within reach, as it were.
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“I am not locked in here with you. You, however, are locked in here with me.”
Or, the ever so succinct “Touchable”.
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The prospiracy. No actual coordination. Merely the suggestion that wouldn’t it be great if everyone made just a little cheat and not say anything about it, while the authorities and officials all looked the other way, dragged their heels, or said, “Not my problem.”
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One of my cousins (gone now, to our sorrow) was a security type. He told us after 9/11 there were literally dozens – maybe hundreds -of attacks our guys managed to block. He worried because only one had to get through.
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–
Still true.
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Seattle Christmas Tree bombing.
2000.
….it was stopped.
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“He told us after 9/11 there were literally dozens – maybe hundreds -of attacks our guys managed to block.”
And isn’t it funny that we never hear about any of it? I mean, it’s been 25 years, right?
Almost as if us knowing what’s up would destroy some plan the elites have in place…
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I heard about several of them. Things like the Portland Christmas bombing that didn’t.
The only ones that hit the national news were when the guy that got arrested tried to play the “you’re an -ist!” card, and I actually payed attention long enough to find out that he just got caught.
“The government is reasonably capable and most people aren’t retarded or evil” doesn’t sell many papers.
For why the folks doing this don’t collect it all? Well, there’s literally hundreds of different groups doing this– and the ones that are organized enough to go around and collect all these in one place don’t want to hand that counter-intel to the bad guys. Even when it’s the open source stuff, you don’t HAND them data.
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“I want to remember Rick Rescorla.”
It is a measure of how far Hollywood has fallen under malign influence that there are not movies about him. He’s every bit as much a hero as Audie Murphy.
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I did. And now younger people know about him, and Flight 93, and the Boatlift.
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I’m going to talk about the “tech is actually going our way, from centralized to distributed” line from the post, but not yet. First I need to talk about the memories. Talking about tech can wait.
I used to take the train to work. It would get to the station around 8:30 Central time, then I would walk maybe a mile and a half, maybe two miles… something like that. Would get to work pretty close to 9:00 Central. This was before the days of cellphone ubiquity, so I usually carried a paperback book with me to read on the train, and read it while I walked: the walk was down some peaceful neighborhoods with good sidewalks, so I only had to look up from the book a few times to cross streets.
I had a pleasant 30-minute walk, completely unaware that the first plane had hit around the time I was walking away from the train station, and the second one hit around the time I was approaching my office. I got into the office, climbed the stairs to the third floor. First thing anyone said to me when I got in was, “Did you hear about the plane crashes?”
I thought “Plural. That’s… not good.” Didn’t take long for me to realize “We’re at war, we just don’t know with whom yet.”
That was also the day I learned to loathe TV news. Someone turned on the TV in the break room, and of course people were gathered around it. But after the TV news anchors played clips of whatever footage they had received at that point, and explained what was going on, they then went on to speculate about who could have done it. Hours before anyone could possibly have gotten evidence, and days before the TV news people could possibly have gotten evidence.
NPR, for all its flaws, was at least doing journalism that day, as opposed to irresponsible speculation. I left the break room and went over to where someone, I forget who, had a radio tuned to the local NPR affiliate station. They kept on, every ten minutes, saying “For those who are just joining us, here’s what we know so far” and sticking to known facts. When they ran out of facts to stick to, they looped around to the beginning and summarized the situation again, then went over the known facts again. Actual reporting the news, as opposed to wild, irresponsible speculation from the TV people.
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My folks would have most likely been hearing NPR– our local did a lot of music, minimal nonsense– all I know is dad came out to mom with her drink and lunch and said “we’re at war. Planes hit the World Trade Center.”
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Thank you.
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That one always makes me cry.
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I hadn’t listened to that yet this year. I needed to. Thank you.
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Now I can talk about the centralization of tech. I see many people concerned that computers used to put power in the hands of individuals, but now everyone’s just subscribing to the same two or three companies: OpenAI (makers of ChatGPT), Anthropic (makers of Claude), and SpaceXAI (makers of Grok). Add Microsoft and Google if you want to consider them, but they’re third-tier behind the top three. OpenAI and Anthropic in the top tier, SpaceXAI behind them (in number of people subscribing), with MS and Google trailing far behind those. (I have no data to back up these impressions, just a gut feeling of which companies are most widely subscribed to right now).
Thing is, there’s a freight train headed for the model-rental companies, and their business model is sitting right in its path. As far as I can tell their business model is tied to the railroad tracks, too. Because local models are already good enough for most people’s work, and they’re just going to get better and cheaper. Local models that fit into “just” 256 GB of video card RAM, meaning “all” you need to do is buy four of those new computers with 64 GB of RAM each and network their video cards together, which the software can definitely handle. That “only” costs about $20,000 or so to purchase that kind of hardware at today’s prices. (Amount of video RAM needed varies widely from model to model, so that $20,000 might be $10,000 instead or might be $27,500).
Thing is? That’s cheaper than renting GPU time from Anthropic! The company I’m working for has bought me one of those standard-level Anthropic subscriptions that go for $20. Every so often I check on my token usage so far… and the Claude Code program helplully prints out not only my own usage, but also how much my tokens would have cost the company if I was paying API pricing. I’ve burned through “$200 worth of tokens” in a single week before… VERY easily. And I’m just one programmer!
Let’s say that I’m using $250 worth of tokens at API price, per week. In other words, $1000 per month. (A perfectly reasonable assumption in my case, though since I’m on a subcription I’m paying a fixed rate and Anthropic is the one who loses money on my usage, since I’m pretty certain that I’m making them spend more money (on power, cooling, etc for the GPUs) than what I’m paying them in exchange.
But I’m on subscription. Companies with over… was it 150 or 250 employees? Must sign up for the API-token payment plan. For them, that’s $150,000 per month if all their employees burn through AI tokens at the same rate. Suddenly spending $20,000 on hardware that you can run locally… just looks like one week’s worth of your “AI spending” budget.
Mark my words (I’ve always wanted to say that), local models that you run on your own network, under your complete control… are coming. Right now the only thing holding them back is that nobody can afford the hardware to run them, because AI companies are hoovering up the world’s entire supply of video cards and video RAM modules. Demand shoots sky-high, prices rise to follow. Eventually, eventually, one of the AI companies can’t get enough subscription dollars, goes bankrupt, and their hardware assets end up being auctioned off. That’s going to cause a ripple through the supply of video cards and RAM, and suddenly customers who’ve been waiting 4 years to buy a new laptop will be able to afford one with 64 GB RAM (or even higher).
And that, that moment when hardware prices start to fall back down to reasonable levels, is the moment when the rent-our-AI-model companies will be doomed. It’ll take a little while for them to actually fall, given how much capital they’re sitting on… but it’ll happen. And the balance will shift back a lot more towards distributed/individual than centralized/collective.
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I am told 4-8 consumer level Apple devices can be ganged together to run a really good one, in your own office or home.
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You were told correctly. One of the things that Apple has been doing on their recent devices is soldering the memory to the motherboard, instead of putting it in DIMM or SODIMM slots. This means that the memory can’t be swapped out, which is why when I first heard about soldered RAM I was 100% against it: why would I want to be stuck with whichever RAM sticks the manufacturer decided on? (Manufacturers often overcharge for RAM: my current laptop I bought with no RAM and purchased the RAM separately, paying half the price I would have if I bought the one the manufacturer would have used). But there’s a pro to it that I hadn’t considered at the time: because the memory is soldered to the motherboard, it can actually be faster — because the hardwired connections allow the RAM to be placed physically closer to the CPU, thereby allowing less round-trip time. And even more importantly for today’s market, it also allows the RAM to be fast enough to be used by the video card.
So instead of separate memory spaces for the CPU and the GPU, where the CPU can access 32 GB and the GPU can access 16 GB (or whatever the numbers are), you can set up a laptop where both the CPU and the GPU can access 48 GB of RAM, and can negotiate between them for how that RAM is split up. This means that local models that need to put 32 GB of data into GPU memory were not feasible on consumer-level hardware before, because buying a video card with 32 GB of RAM was expensive enough to price itself out of the consumer-level market. But with soldered RAM, it’s feasible to have 32 GB available for the graphics card. And so local models become possible.
And yes, Apple devices can network themselves together and make all their RAM available to the graphics card, letting you split a model between four computers. Making it even feasible to run models up to 256 GB in size.
If the Anthropic leadership aren’t looking at the proliferation of open-weight models like Qwen 3.6 (for anyone who doesn’t know, “open-weight” is basically synonymous with “local models”: it means you can freely download the entire model and run it on your own hardware as long as you have enough RAM) and worrying about their business model’s long-term viability, then they’re even bigger idiots than I think they are.
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“…local models are already good enough for most people’s work, and they’re just going to get better and cheaper.”
I was hoping you were going to say that. ~:D
Yes, and I notice that Apple is -not- building server farms like everybody else. They’re gearing up to sell the home/small office version. Because once the chip makers get back on track, and the firehose of chips becomes a Niagara Falls of cheap RAM, guess what? Nobody wants to pay rent. Everybody wants to own.
Best part, thanks to #TheDonald, the source is in the USA instead of Taiwan. (Taiwan will still be there, just not the only game in town.)
Coming in from a different angle, all the big guys are fear mongering that AI is going to get away on them. Elon and a couple more just came out and said they wanted to “slow down AI” in case something bad might happen.
Because they want to RENT IT TO YOU!!! Think about it. If it’s so dangerous it might turn into Skynet, will the government let you run it at home?
So the big guys want to get it established in everybody’s minds that AI must be regulated and only run at a Government Certified (TM) facility so it doesn’t escape and kill us all. And what could be more secure than a compute farm in orbit? Elon really wants that.
You can tell it’s all bullsh1t by who is cheerleading for it. #DemocRats (and the full-on communists) are running on it. If there’s one thing we know for sure by now, if the #Dems like it, we don’t. And they like it because it makes government bigger, it consolidates power in government hands, and they get some juicy side-deals. (Senator Foghorn want the Government certified containment facility built in his state, because he owns the concrete cartel there.)
#TheDonald, by contrast, tweeted this morning that A) nobody is slowing down the AI build out B) because then the Chicoms will win, and C) anybody who says AI is going to kill us all is both an idiot and a traitor to the USA. I haven’t read the tweet myself so I don’t know if he used the “T” word, but that was the jist of the conversation as it was related to me.
Because #Donnie, for all his faults, knows that there’s no faster way to kill something than government regulation. And the USA needs this to work, or y’all will be Europe in another ten years.
For myself, Chez Phantom will be getting a Mac-Mini to run local AI in the next month or so, and I’ll be doing my book publishing efforts with AI support. I’ve got like 10 or so books sitting here ready to go, and I don’t want them to be released into the world only to be buried under the Amazon slush pile. Like the first three.
So I’ll have a go with AI support, and we’ll see how Angels Inc. fares on the market.
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https://redstate.com/kyle-becker/2026/09/14/dirty-little-secret-comes-out-about-bernie-sanders-bid-for-government-controlled-ai-n2206886
If Bernie’s for it, I’m agin’ it.
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“If Bernie’s for it, I’m agin’ it.”
It’s like they can’t help themselves. Socialist Tourette’s syndrome.
The scam is so badly done and so obvious this time, like they’re out of time and out of money.
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If I had to have my computer parts built overseas, I’d much prefer Taiwan over its bigger neighbor on the mainland. But I’m also glad there’s an American-built option.
I have been avoiding Apple hardware for a while now, because 1) they are lousy on repairability (for a while they were the only maufacturer ever to get a 0/10, yes zero, repairability score from iFixit), and 2) their hardware tends to be overpriced compared to same-spec hardware from a PC manufacturer.
That second point is starting to shift, though. For one thing, now that Apple is producing their own CPU chips (and those chips are really good), it’s not quite same-spec hardware that you’re comparing to anymore. And the other thing is that every manufacturer’s hardware is overpriced these days, due to the market distortions caused by the massive data-center buildout. (Though I’m told that motherboards are going cheap if you buy them without RAM, so many people are stockpiling motherboards and CPUs now while they’re cheap and waiting to pair them with RAM in a few years). Both those factors mean that Apple hardware is suddenly a better value proposition than it used to be, especially since they have done a lot of work making sure they are useful for local models (I’m sure it would be possible to network multiple machines together to split a model across multiple machines, but Apple has made it easy. Okay, easy-ish.)
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“Though I’m told that motherboards are going cheap if you buy them without RAM…”
We decided on the Mac because of the architecture. It’s better/faster at an AI workload than a PC with a big honkin’ video card for comparable money because integrated memory design. The next-gen PCs will probably start going that way, AMD seems to be.
Honestly, for a guy that used to be a PC nerd, I haven’t looked into it all that much. Here in the Demented Dominion, a decent motherboard (aka an X870) is getting up there. $400-$700 Snowbucks for the naked board, no CPU no RAM no power supply. And unless you stack it with hefty memory and a smokin’ video card, the Mac will eat it’s lunch. Then you’re up to ~$5k. Memory and storage is enough to give me a heart attack when I look at the prices.
Leading me to feel that the PC/Windows cartel lost the plot quite some time ago. I mean, I haven’t built a PC since maybe 2019-ish? I haven’t needed to (thank heaven), the one I built is still massive overkill for my workload, and it’s been six years. Runs the new resource hog Windows 11 just fine.
I do feel that PC hardware will be cheap later. In a couple more years, after this demand bulge goes by, hardware will be extremely cheap and enough faster to be worth buying again. Or so I hope, anyway. ~:D
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Graduates of my old school who went to work that morning and never came back. They left wives and children, and sons who never knew their father. They were bond traders and firemen, cops and engineers. The list is longer now as the damage done on the day continues to take its toll, but let us remember the day’s fallen:
Frank Spinelli, Stephen Huczko, Charles Margiotta, Thomas Celic, Steve Fiorelli, Stephen Lauria, John Casazza, Martin Egan, Scott McGovern, Neil Leavy, Steven Hagis, Brian Cannizzaro, Vincent Laieta, William Micciulli, Jeff Stark, Shawn Bowman, Carl DiFranco, Joseph Ianelli, Peter Mulligan, Michael Clarke, Keith Roma, Christopher Mozzillo, Joseph Visciano, Raymond Ragucci, Sean Kenney, William O’Connor, James Tancredi, Denis Hogan, Patrick Murphy, James Vanacore, Ned Thompson
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
I was in Hong Kong Airport and thought it was a movie until my wife told me it wasn’t. Flew back to England, where we were then living, and the phone lit up. After a few days I had to ask my mother to stop telling me the names. I knew then the answer to John Keegan’s research question of how it felt back in East Belfast in the days after the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
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Nick Bogdan. Used to hang out in our basement with beloved and buddies when we lived in NJ and were active in the SCA. Married, two children.
I can’t look at a list of the names without looking for his and choking up.
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in moderation. When you see the topic you’ll see why I am not well please with being there
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I’ve freed it. WP is weird.
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Delenda est and all that.
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Yesterday the teacher in whose room I was in brought up some 9/11 video and explained the history of the day to the students. I asked him to pull up Rick Rescorla, and he did.
While he was pulling it up I explained how the man saved everyone. And yes, he died going back for the stragglers, but he didn’t have to. Because he prepared, and held the line, and he did what was right and proper, Just In Case the Word Day ever happened.
Which it did.
You can do that to. You can be Rick Rescorla.
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*worst. Stupid stupid fumble-fingers.
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Our response should have been immediate and nuclear. Horrifying. Even if it was only a few tac-nukes to minimal effect. The message would be clear. FAFO, indeed.
Do not -ever- eff with the USA, do not attack, unless you want to become Trinitite.
“Let them hate, so long as they fear.”
or “Eff around, drift around”
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I agree, glassing some places, even smallerish places, would have made foreigners afraid, a good outcome.
GWB was too open to advice from CIA and the Foggy Bottom Boys to be worried about what the House of Saud thought, rather than making the House of Saud worried about what the U.S. thought, thus his near immediate pivot to “it’s a religion of peace” and “go to the mall” rather than “Rubble not bouncing enough. I still see buildings standing in Kabul.”
However, given the preceding election as a timeline divergence point, I sincerely doubt an Algore(BillyJeff-redux) Administration would have done more than lob a few tomahawks into an empty compound in the wilds of Afghanistan, so of the two possibilities at that split we did get the better one.
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I recall spending weeks watching The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, and Airwolf.
From a purely historical point of view it’s sobering how many trouble spots in Airwolf are still trouble today, and for many of the same reasons.
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I was working at New Orleans International Airport.
Yeah.
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I was at home for a mental health day. in oyher words, I called in sick because I needed a break from the toxic work environment. We were switching from satellite TV to cable and I was also home for the appointment. I had led the tech to the cable box outside, when he said, “know what I heard? I heard a plane crashed into the World trade center.” I was unbothered right then, except for the lives lost, and I said a silent prayer for them. I was telling him about the B-25 that crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945 as he worked. He completed the circuit and said we should check to see if it worked. We went inside, and I turned on the TV, just in time to see the second plane hit. The tech and I just looked at each other, our mouths hanging open. Then he said, “I’d better finish up so we can figure out what’s going on.” At that moment, it hit me how similar (at least for me) this was to Kennedy’s assassination, and I knew right then we were at war. I suspected Muslims, and I was right, because they have never, un-declared war against us Christians and Jews. I knew then that they would not stop and they would not waver. I freaking hate being right.
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The war is forever. We win today but tomorrow is another battle. And unlike Valhalla, we don’t come back from dying on the battlefield to feast, drink, boast, wench, and sleep until tomorrow’s battle. Those of us still standing can do all that, but we need to re-instill the will to fight when we open our eyes each new day. Fighting the looters and enslavers is like shoveling out the chicken coop. It’s a dirty job, we don’t get much joy in it, and yet it still needs to be done.
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There’s always someone lurking in the wings even when you beat the current enemy. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t beat the current enemy. But never let your guard down.
In the meantime, we hope that our leadership properly identifies the right threats and gets rid of them before more bad things happen. And we wait for the opportunity to deal knockout blows to the causes of those threats.
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When the significance of your grand act is distilled into barbecues, remembrances, and increased patriotic fervor (or spirit, if you prefer), methinks the purpose remains yet unfulfilled on the other side’s part for all the graves have already been filled, as it were.
We’ve had the USS Cole, the Beirut bombings, the various and sundry spitfires and petulant pissants that have poked and prodded with their mighty little perturbances. I do remember, when I’m of a mind to. Missing friends and all that. Missing voices at the dinner table, on the other end of the line, on the other side of the screen.
And yet, a small stubborn bit of me says it’s alright anyway. See, the wee little barbarians with their fulminating fury want to drag us down to their level. They try. And they fail. Constantly.
That’s not how empire works, you see. Empires use the big hammer and splat goes the barbarian, and on we carry. Sometimes it takes a while. But, tut tut, normal life is rather resilient. Babies being born? Check. Schooling and groceries and bills oh my? Doubleplus check. We have our holidays, and this is becoming one. Like Memorial Day, for example. I see cookouts in my future.
Perhaps that’s a Southron thing, but we bring food to the afterfuneral (and the before, there’s specific dishes different for each). Perhaps it’s a relic of when everybody was scraping close to the bone, and a hard hit like that could set one back. Food is life, but more than that food is care. Especially if it’s good food. There are casseroles that the children almost went to war over when my aunt died, for example.
That there exist somewhere out there and possibly close by folks that want to kill us ain’t all that special on the scale of History with the capital H. I suspect some highly theoretical ghosts out there would not be all that impressed. As a people and a culture, we are far and away on a path that is going somewhere better than a re-enactment of a certain period of barely AD (couple, three centuries) history.
Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s cooking to do.
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9/11 and Covid are the two of the three sea changes in my life*. There’s a clear before and after as my understanding of the world changed. I thought I was cynical about government before 2020.
*The third is personal and irrelevant to this discussion.
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That I forgot covid tells you how hard 10/7 hit.
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I was apparently woken up by the low frequency rumble of United Flight 175 as it passed less than 20 miles from me it approached NYC that morning. One of the worst parts in the immediate hours was just getting broadcast information, as all the regional TV transmitters except FOX were mounted on one of the towers and were destroyed. Just like the Manhattan Emergency Command Center was in one of the towers and was also destroyed. And we knew we were under attack, but not by who, and how many more planes might be involved. The fear was that it might be a lot more than 4. I still have several VHS tapes from that day and the ones that followed. If I can spare the money I have found some experts that can digitize them and preserve for posterity.
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One potential employer had plants in Southern California and Metro Boston. (Teradyne). Started to get some interest from the SoCal people, then 9/11 happened, and a) they lost key people on the plane, and b) most of the tech world decided that hiring people post 9/11 was A Bad Idea. (And some of the exceptions had more red flags than a Commies-r-Us parade.)
I finally got a job consulting for a German company, but due to (among other things) Edifice Complex, the company went bankrupt in 2002. However, I had earned enough to finish the San Jose house so we could retire for good and move to the conservative part of Oregon. (Yes, it exists, though under the thumb of the libtards in Salem and Portland.)
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Don’t dawdle if you intend to convert those tapes. The signals degrade over time. After 25 years it might already be too late.
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My folks were visiting my stepfather’s grown) kids in Maryland and Virginia on 9/11. They had flown from the Midwest, but after a couple of days, they decided to drive back. Mom was the driver, and it must have been rough, though she never said much about the return trim.
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Our enemies are savages. They reject 1,400 years of civilization. They are worse than animals, because they choose not to be better than they are.
Either we are governed by laws, enacted and agreed to by (almost) all, fairly and impartially applied, or we are governed by brutality. As we have seen ever since 2020.
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Fortunately I didn’t know anyone working in the towers. But the company that I was working for at the time was heavily connected to the market, and had clients there. One of my bosses told me that they were in the middle of a call with one of those clients when the first plane hit. There was yelling, and then the line went dead.
The more humiliation that religion undergoes, the better. Arab culture likes the strong horse. Humiliate it enough while giving its adherents the option to look elsewhere, and I suspect it will fade rapidly. And that, of course, is one of the reasons why its adherents aren’t allowed to look elsewhere.
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I was actually working for the Dept.of the Army. I was about to pull into the parking lot at my office, listening to the news and yelling at my radio because the big item was Michael Jordan’s latest sports change. “I don’t want celebrity gossip, I want real news!” And oh, there was a minor item about a plane possibly hitting the WTC.
Got inside and found everyone clustered around their computers because, due to reasons known only to God and the Army, they had hooked our computers into CNN and Fox. Looked at the imagery and said (to myself), “That ain’t a small plane.” And then, came the second one, in real time, obviously a passenger jet. Then the word about the Pentagon. Then the building collapse, then Pennsylvania….
They turned us loose around noon. I had lunch, then headed for the Red Cross, only to discover at least 100 people had gotten there ahead of me. So on to home. For weeks afterward the Arsenal didn’t get 8-hour days because it took 2 hours to creep through the gates and the very thorough security check. And no planes in the sky.
For me, the first bit of closure came on a day off, think it was actually New Year’s Eve, at home with son not there. I had bought a copy of Kenny G’s “Millenial” CD and played the version of Auld Lang Syne with the audio clips from famous moments in the 20th century. And when it got to 9/11 I just totally lost it and sat in the living room, rocking back and forth and crying.
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I carefully kept us off the news radio (driving home from a project), but it seemed to hit harder this year.
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Something to note about information distribution—especially for the young’uns—is that it’s not immediate, nor is it complete.
I say this because the first thing I heard about was “The Pentagon is on fire.”
I was taking a bus to my retail job in a West Coast city, and one of the people getting on the bus had listened to a minute or two of radio news before getting on the bus. And what he had heard was that the Pentagon was on fire. I joined to discussion when someone started worrying about weapons in some basement catching on fire, and explained that since the Pentagon was a planning building, there would be no weapons storage underneath that, that would be foolish.
The driver was so caught up in this talk that he missed his turn and had to do a three-point turn across all four lanes of River Road.
It wasn’t until my transfer that I heard about the towers being hit, and people dying. (SOME twit was talking like the whole thing was funny, and I think the only reason that she didn’t get punched was that none of us felt like that would be appropriate, even if deserved.)
And let me be clear—I worked that day, a full shift, no radio or television. Decently busy, since the mall across the way wasn’t open, and I felt so much older than most of my coworkers, who couldn’t comprehend that anyone would consider killing innocents. (In my early twenties, I’d somehow assimilated the fact of true evil.)
Anyway. No news for me until after the bus ride home, where I had to turn the channel to a Spanish-language station so I wouldn’t further traumatize my MiL. I didn’t see most of the footage from that day until years later, when it got put online. (I’m fairly sure I didn’t see video of the falling folk until the last five, either.)
I will say there’s a lot of good stuff up in the last week or so from survivors. I’m particularly pleased with one from the guy who got out from the 78th floor with his guide dog, because most of that podcast is about preparation, resilience, and overcoming other people’s perceived liabilities.
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If I remember correctly, the guide dog not only got his handler out, but handed off his handler to a human (or someone took over) then the guide dog went back to guide others out. Guide dog did get out alive. (Myth? IDK Good story.)
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What I think I heard about it was that he and his dog encountered others, a couple of them a bit hysterical (understandable). The calmness of his dog and his trust in it led to them folowing him and the dog basically led a small group out.
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This is more plausible.
I can see how the telling can expand from this. As in: “The dog lead me out!” Leaving off the dog was actually leading his handler out and the group joined them, instead implying the dog came in to find the individual, or groups out.
Comes under “for the rest of the story.”
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IIRC (it’s been a while since I read the book), he had to stay calm to keep the dog calm (and vice versa) which helped to keep their group calm.
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A sibling point, you can’t block it.
Great Lakes training command did not have any kind of method for “hey, 9/11 happened.”
I heard about it because one of the girls was at medical, and the TV was on. She saw a plane hit, no idea which.
… it actually went in such a way I spent most of the day going “is this another stupid movie idea that our head instructor came up with?”
But it wasn’t unknown.
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:has to look up name, because I don’t do names:
I actually just explained Rick Rescorla to our 8 year old daughter.
She came up stairs for “one more hug” and caught me watching ‘chaos and escape, how daycare teachers saved dozens of children’, and went “those are the Twin Towers.”
She remembered a lot of the stories I’ve told.
She asked about people who lived, and I explained how one of the guys was very worried because there’d been a little bomb attack, so he made everyone practice. He got everyone out when the first plane hit.
And then went back up to get more people out. And he did, but he didn’t come back.
“That’s a hero.”
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YES.
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I stayed home that day, I don’t remember why, and got a call from my sister. Spent the rest of the day glued to the TV.
I remember all the stories about toddlers who would not let Daddy leave the house, missed trains, traffic snarls, so that far fewer people were in the towers that day than usual.
And 25 years later, 9% of NY voters got a Jihadist Muslim in as mayor of New York. “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” has a watered down PC version, and idiots riot in our streets in favor of terrorists.
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The rescue dog memorial in West Orange, NJ; one of many spots in New Jersey where you could and can see NYC from high spots. Used to catch a glimpse of the towers driving home from work, and can never forget driving home the afternoon of 9/11 and seeing the large plume of smoke. Never Forget, and Never Forgive. Let those who carried out, supported, and still support the attacks suffer eternal torment, both here on Earth and in the afterlife.
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Sometimes I reflect on how experiencing such traumatic events as 9/11 even vicariously thru the news broadcasts and such can leave lasting impacts on one’s psyche, even when outwardly one has assimilated the knowledge and is able to function quite rationally. For me, it is two odd habits.
I was on the freeway driving to work when I heard the news on the radio. I remember not much work got done that day as we were all glued to the news broadcasts on our desk computers and trying to find sense in the horrors, and heroism, of what we were seeing and being told.
I worked on the 8th floor of a 19-floor office building in Portland, OR. IIRC it was just two days later that there was a bomb scare and they evacuated our whole building. I grabbed my purse and actually took two minutes to stop in the ladies room before I joined the queue.
We were all calm, no outward panic, as we marched down the many many steps, out of the building, and out to our designated rendezvous parking lot. We stood around I don’t remember how long, until the all clear was given and we went back into the building. I think they let us all go home then – don’t remember. A lot of employees had just left from the parking lots.
It was not until I got home that it hit me viscerally why I had grabbed my purse. Because, after watching the chaos of the twin towers, if it HAD been a bomb and the worst happened, my greatest fear was my body being found with no identification on it. Since that day I have worn a belt pack containing all the necessities whenever I leave the house.
And 25 years later I still get a disturbing twinge whenever I see a clock display reading 9:11.
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