Ten years ago this morning? We all remember. It seems so long ago, and yet paradoxically it feels like yesterday. Hard to believe that in 2016, there will be people voting for a President who do not remember 9-11. Because of the location and scope of the buildings it was intensely personal for the rest of us, something we’ll surely never forget. 

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in my local office, one branch of hundreds for a large Wall Street firm that leased over a million square feet in 2 World Trade Center, also known as the south tower. That building was our corporate headquarters. I knew it well, I’ll always remember it as it once was, two silver towers sprouting out of the tangle of lower Manhattan. In 1991, as part of my initial training, I had spent a month living in what was then called the Vista Hotel in between the two towers. By 2001 I knew hundreds of fellow employees who worked in the second tower. It was lucky for most of them that the first plane hit the other building and hit high.

That wasn’t the only stroke of luck. Back in 1993, when powerful explosions rocked the basement of the south tower, my new junior partner was finishing up the last day of his month-long training in the worst place possible, eating lunch at the Windows on the World restaurant at the tippy top. He and everyone else with him got out safely from the 107th floor that day. They had walked down a hundred flights of stairs, with cloth napkins held over their mouths. Later he told me it took over an hour to get down, with his hand stretched out touching the shoulder of the person in front for guidance, step, wait, then step again, in the dim emergency lights as smoke hung thicker with every floor.

In a way that earlier terrorist strike would be a life saver. As a direct result all companies with offices inside the buildings, both the South and North Tower developed and drilled on evacuating the massive structures. As my coworkers sat silent in our local office on Sep 11, we each hoped, and soon learned, that those drills initiated in 1993 would indeed save thousands of lives in 2001. Estimates of the loss of life in the towers alone ranged as high as 25,000 people. Due in large part to the preparations made after the 1993 attack, less than a tenth of that would perish. It will never seem like a miracle to the friends and family of those who fell, but a miracle it was: in less than one-hour tens of thousands would walk to safety, among them dozens of personal friends of mine who got out with minutes to spare.

When the second plane burned in, to our building, that’s when it crystalized, that’s when we all knew this was an attack. One veteran broker, an ex-military officer, turned and said “That looks like Osama bin Laden.” I had heard of the name, knew vaguely he was some sort of terrorist asshole hell-bent on killing Americans. I remembered a TV news magazine piece, perhaps 60 Minutes, where a terrorist expert had mentioned rumors that terrorists had considered hitting the World Trade Centers with hijacked airplanes. It seemed obvious now that those schemes had come to fruition.

Then it happened. The second tower to get hit would be the first to topple. The shock of what we were watching transformed from horror to apocalyptic. The scene of utter destruction, which is now etched into the national psyche like a diamond lithograph in hard glass.

Looking back on the whole horrible decade that followed, with the rare successes and serial blunders that ensued, I must confess, the one thing that gives me some grim satisfaction is the thought that Osama bin Laden was shot down by US Navy SEALS in the middle the night, in his own bedroom tucked away safely, he believed, in a yuppie military suburb of Pakistan. Call me shallow, call me vindictive. But as events unfold this anniversery, there is a new, final element in the tragedy that wasn’t there in years past. The thought of the terror in bin Laden’s eyes is my sole source of comfort when reflecting on that terrible dark day that changed America forever.

 

… for not posting today. Yesterday morning I was wakeboarding with some friends on a gorgeous, empty lake, planted the nose on a 180 like a noob, and planted my face into the water an instant later. It happened so fast there wasn’t time to blink. any wake-boarder has done their share of face-plants, eye baths, etc., and I’m no different, gallons of water have been pasted on my face. But this particular fall was different.

By a freakish accident of physics the fall was unusually symmetrical, and instead of partly slicing into the water with one shoulder or another, the perfect belly-buster hyper-extended my back violently for a split second and SNAP, I felt something give in my lower spine.  I didn’t know what had happened for sure at the time, but it seemed prudent to assume the worst. Later I learned the bottom right rib cracked where it articulates with the spine at the lumbar-thoracic symphysis, plus tore some muscles including part of the diaphragm.

It knocked the breath clean out of me and for an instant I saw jagged shooting-stars. Right away even before surfacing, I carefully wiggled my fingers and toes, feet and hands, fortunately there was no tingling or numbness. I remember floating there face-down in agony and thinking, of all things, I have really good insurance. It’s a real-world nasty observation on the US healthcare system that that’s what came to mind. But getting back into the boat and then crawling up a very long flight of stairs chased that comforting thought away with intense pain. I thought that would be the worst part, that after getting up away from the lake and into a comfy car seat the rest would be downhill.

Wrong! The one hour drive to the emergency room was the longest one hour of my life. It was like a string of red-hot coals were shoved deep inside the lower flank. Breathing became progressively more difficult.

Because another thing I didn’t know at the time was my chest was filling up with blood and the lung was collapsing. By the time I managed to get checked in, get a CAT scan and X-rays, and have them read, there was half a liter of fluid between my right lung and the pleura. At which point the ER staff at the smaller facility did call an ambulance and whisked me off to the trauma center at Brackenridge hospital in downtown Austin (Where the nickname for myc ase quickly became “The Wakeboarder,” which I was kinda proud of). By then it was clear there was no damage to the spinal canal, plus I was chock full of Dilaudid, so I wasn’t nearly as worried about permanent injury. But even with IV narcotics coursing through the veins it hurt so bad I kept hoping I would just pass out.

One cool thing, they gave me the CD ROM of the CAT scan, so as soon as I can figure out how to get it on video it will be posted and any of you medical guys and gals can have a look. In the meantime, even with 20 mg of Oxycontin in me, it hurts like a mother fucker. Posting may be light for the next day or two.

My friend Sheril Kirshenbaum has a newish blog, Culture of Science, and she captured this exchange from the GOP debate:

HARRIS to HUNTSMAN: You yourself have said the party is in danger of becoming anti- science. Who on this stage is anti-science?

HUNTSMAN: Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I’m saying is that, in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science. We can’t run from mainstream conservative philosophy. We’ve got to win voters.

A better answer would have been, they’re all antiscience, by necessity. Mittens of Romney perhaps less so at one time, but now he’s got to chase the crazy vote like everyone else, and Tricky Rick Perry is giving him a run for the money. It’s rapidly becoming a sort of cold war of crazy to see who can sounds the nuttiest.

The other day I overheard a couple of people joking about who was crazier, Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry. The answer of course is neither, they’re just cynical. But some of the voters they’re going after are indeed crazy and it’s not easy to say which group wins the contest. It’s like trying to choose between a half-naked gibbering lunatic standing on the street corner screaming at the sky or a quiet loner scanning cereal boxes at the grocery store for secret messages. They’re both nuts in their own way.

The James Webb Telescope is an ambitious piece of space engineering which could greatly extend our understanding of the cosmos. In the current budgetary environment of slash and burn, it’s also a financial black hole threatening other valuable science missions at NASA. Now, a group of high-profile space scientists and engineers have published a letter saying so:

When JWST was ranked as the top major initiative for NASA astrophysics in the 2001 NRC Astronomy Decadal Survey, it was estimated to cost $1B and launch by 2011. NASA has now spent $3.5B on JWST and it is now projected to cost a minimum of $8.7B for a launch no earlier than late 2018. As a result, JWST’s cost increases have outstripped the resources of the NASA Science Mission Directorate’s Astrophysics Division, and NASA leadership has now declared JWST an “agency priority.” Resources of other NASA programs, including the Agency’s Planetary Sciences Division within the Science Mission Directorate, are now threatened to cover current and future JWST cost overruns.

There are people high up in NASA who are behind the JWST no matter what the cost for one primary reason: public relations. The Hubble Space Telescope was more than a smashing scientific success, once the focusing issue was fixed, it was a public relations bonanza. Ask anyone to name a telescope at random and odds are good they’ll say Hubble.

Understandably, NASA planners see the JWST as the next big thing that will appeal to the masses. And there’s nothing wrong with that, NASA is funded by politicians making it a political agency in part which has to fight for every scrap like any other bureaucracy. But without significantly more funding, the JWST could easily swallow entire NASA departments, a dozen promising missions to other planets and moons would have to be put on hold indefinitely or scrapped altogether. If we as a nation want this device, we as a nation will have to pay for it.

While the neo-clowns position and parry like a swarm of sharks high on chum fumes, President Obama unveiled an ambitious jobs program in front of a joint session of congress last night:

He used a 33-minute address to describe a collection of tax cuts, subsidies, government benefits and incentives that he said would help to grow the economy, bolster the recovery and create jobs. At times he talked tough to Congress. At times he cajoled. And at times he ridiculed. “The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy,” the president said. He is calling his proposal, simply, the American Jobs Act. With the unemployment rate lodged for a 2nd month at 9.1%, and with job gains zeroed out by job losses in August, Mr. Obama called this “an urgent time for our country.”

I haven’t read the proposal yet, but the $450 billion plan reportedly includes tax incentives for hiring new workers, a payroll tax holiday for the middle-class, and loads of infrastructure spending.

It’s too early to say for sure, but so far Republicans seem split over the idea, similar to their split between jostling front-runners for the GOP presidential nomination Mittens and Tricky Rick. They’ll probably have to wait until Boss Limbaugh and Granny Fox weigh in on which way they should go.

Multiple news sources are reporting the bankrupt solar energy company Solyndra has been subject to a comprehensive search by federal officials:

Two days after the now-defunct, high-profile solar company filed for bankruptcy protection, federal agents swarmed around Solyndra’s campus in Fremont to execute a search warrant and interview laid-off employees. Dozens of FBI agents and investigators from the Department of Energy Office of the Inspector General descended on the four buildings along Kato Road and Page Avenue, which run alongside Interstate 880 as early as 7 a.m.

Despite receiving half a billion in low interest federal loans, the firm closed its doors abruptly last week and sent over a thousand employees home with no explanation or severance pay.
But I’ll wager a guess what happened: the same kind of usual scumbags who ripped off the banking sector for billions got inside this company and promptly worked their magic there too. The bankstas who wrecked the US economy got off scot free, hopefully these crooks will be caught and locked up for life.

A new survey released by Yale University comes with good news and bad news on the state of scientific literacy in the US. This may be shocking to some readers — prepare yourselves! — the biggest political block in denial is the Teaparty wing of the Republican party. The study had some good news: all four political groups, which broke down in the poll as 39% Democrats, 25% Independents, 24% traditional Republicans, and 12% Teaparty Republicans, favored more research into renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power and providing tax rebates for people who purchase energy efficient vehicles or solar panels.

But when it comes to the science and the solution, the Teaparty is out on their own limb. Majorities of Democrats, Indies, and Republicans support international efforts to restrict greenhouses emissions. Teaparty Republicans oppose this, 55% oppose it strongly.

When asked if global was even happening, majorities of Democrats (78%), Indies (71%), and even traditional Republicans (53%) were able to read the global temperature record above produced by NASA and answer yes. Only 34% of Teaparty Republicans could do so and 53% of them answered with a flat no, it’s not happening. And here’s the tragically funny part:

Even though their views are at odds with the vast majority of climate scientists, Tea Partiers are also by far the most confident in their beliefs — more likely to say they are “very well informed” and that they “do not need any more information about global warming.” Note that this dovetails with earlier research finding that when you give those dismissive of global warming more information, it only serves to harden their doubts.

The entire GOP, and possibly the nation, is being utterly controlled by a small minority of know-nothing, born again, right-wing zealots who are not just dead wrong, they’re absolutely certain they are right.

I watched the debate clowns last night, laughing out loud regularly, as each conservative government-employed poser took turns decrying government and proclaiming it must stay out of our lives (With the exception of policing uteruses, regulating birth control, decreeing who can and cannot marry, whisking people off to third-world shit-holes to be tortured without trial or due process, and covering the respective clown’s paycheck, healthcare, and retirement benefits of course). 

The very next question was if Obama could or should intervene in the price of gas. The answers were all, basically, yes he could and he should. Clown Bachmann said it this way “”Don’t forget the day President Obama took office, gasoline was $1.79 a gallon. It’s entirely possible for us to get back to inexpensive energy. The problem is energy is too high. Let’s have a goal of bringing it down because every time gasoline increases 10 cents a gallon, there’s $14 billion in economic activity that every American has taken out of their pocket.”

That’s a good point, our economy is critically dependent on energy prices. But I guess I’m confused here, or someone is anyway. What is the wingnut position on government? Should it stay the hell out of our lives, or should it be so intimately involved in every last detail that it controls the price of a gallon of gas at the corner store? This is the problem with people afraid of elementary logic. They’re hopelessly inconsistent. Subject any one of them to uncensored Q & A for five minutes and the poor candidate would be so tied up in knots of their own making that even the Great Houdini couldn’t get them loose.

Or maybe she just has a twisted sense of humor. It has not rained in large swaths of the very large state of Texas for a year, and this summer has been by far the hottest on record. It’s dry here, so dry that parts of the state are on fire or lay in smoking ruin. Our Governor, Tricky Ricky, sent out his vaunted rain proclamation in April and followed it up with a group rain dance in August. Since then a dozen tropical storms have formed, several becoming major hurricanes. It’s been an active season:

Nate is the 14th named storm this year, and comes three days before the climatological half-way point of the Atlantic hurricane season, September 10. A typical hurricane season has just 10 – 11 named storms, so we’ve already had 35% more than a whole season’s worth of storms before reaching the season’s half-way point. At this rate, 2011 will see 28 named storms, equalling the all-time record set in 2005.

Everyone of them has missed the Lone Star state by a country mile. There are currently three, count em three, Atlantic cyclones churning about and one of them, Nate, is a short drive away by local standards. It is forecast to hit the Texas coast. By the time it does, given the current sea surface temperatures and heat gradient in the gulf, Nate could easily be a major hurricane with rain bands extending into the drought-stricken central portions as far north as Dallas.

Will it? Maybe, hopefully, but if it doesn’t it’ll be even more evidence that Perry’s God doesn’t like him.

The title of the article is Texas Wildfires: Is Rick Perry being hypocritical asking for federal aid? Gosh, ya think?

This week, the administration gave seven local disaster declarations to specific Texas counties, but Perry criticized the federal government for not making bulldozers at Fort Hood available to firefighters in nearby Bastrop County. This after the Republican-led Texas Legislature cut volunteer fire department “assistance grants” for equipment like bulldozers by 75 percent this summer to help balance the state budget. In Texas, volunteer firefighters do 80 percent of the wildland firefighting.

Umm, yeah, cutting equipment used by a volunteer fire department and then implying a political rival is causing the problem adds up to more than mere hypocrisy, it is full blown lying out of your ass duplicity. So yes, Perry is being a hypocritical liar, but then so are all the Teaparty darlings. Michelle Bachmann has personally and professionally made out like a bandit on one federal program after another. Previous GOP nominee front-runner Millard Romney grew up the privileged baby boy of a career politician serving in the Nixon cabinet. Even Dr. Ron Paul, the father of the Teaparty movement, enjoyed federal aid and the benefit of federal spending before and after Hurricane Ike did billions of dollars in damage to his home district in 2009, without which his constituents would probably have called for his head. What’s more is this is normal, this is how our system of government works.

When conservatives need trillions to bail out idiot investment bankers or dole out no-bid energy contracts or hand out truckloads of hundred bills to corrupt officials and mercenaries in Iraq, worries about deficit spending evaporate like morning dew. But when an actual American taxpayer asks for help suddenly it’s a national crisis. Deficit hysteria is simply a convenient smoke screen for conservatives to cower behind anytime We the People dare ask for a portion of our own tax dollars to help blunt the cutting edge of disastrous wingnut policies.