Althouse: "New Yorkers defiant in face of terror threat."

September 11, 2011

"New Yorkers defiant in face of terror threat."

One more day of defiance passes in New York City.

19 comments:

David said...: "A refrigerator saved my life."; 9/11/11, 9:24 PM
David said...: Each tower came down in about 10 seconds.; 9/11/11, 9:27 PM
Scott said...: On Monday, 3 million people will go to work in Manhattan.

Defiance? Apart from the people who move to New York City for better opportunities in their line of work, people do it because they don't see any other viable options.

But that doesn't make a good news article.; 9/11/11, 9:30 PM
Scott said...: "Each tower came down in about 10 seconds."

Ten seconds from when?

That's one of those bogus floating figures. I watched the second tower collapse with my own eyes, and it took a lot longer than ten seconds.

wv: squalism; 9/11/11, 9:32 PM
Anonymous said...: News flash: Islam is not going to Conquer the World.

Peter; 9/11/11, 9:36 PM
Scott said...: The advantage of being a stateless political entity is that you can't launch nuclear missiles at them.; 9/11/11, 9:39 PM
SunnyJ said...: Scott take a deep breath. Film that is not slomo, shows it took about 10 sec once the first visible signs of crumbling showed for the towers to drop.

Do you seriously think that personal perceptions, your view, your own reactions might not alter how long something takes to happen.

I can tell you I got bucked off a horse about 8 weeks ago, and it seemed like it took minutes as I flew through the air and tried to decide how to land. Reality is that it took less than 5 sec's from start to finish.

Surely you know by now that what you think you see is not what you actually see until Obama tells you what it is that you didn't see but you are suppose to say you saw...or something like that.; 9/11/11, 9:41 PM
Scott said...: Read again. The question was:

"Ten seconds from when?"

And it was in response to:

"Each tower came down in about 10 seconds."

And no, it did not take 10 seconds. The South Tower collapsed in 56 minutes. The North Tower took 102 minutes.

You take a deep breath, pinche.; 9/11/11, 9:53 PM
Carol_Herman said...: Great place for adults. Hard place to raise kids.

You know, when Paris was considered the "hot spot" ... back in the 1800's ... they didn't even have toilets! I don't even think their apartment had closets. But it was the height of fashion to be there!

Fran Libowitz said something interesting. She said not only did the AIDs epidemic in the 1980's wipe out the top tier of the gay community ... (Those were the people getting laid a lot). But it also wiped out the audiences.

That's how the 5th tier of talent came to take over everything.

Still, it's a city worth walking through. And, yes. You really do walk everywhere, there.

But things change.

What has changed New York City the most are the costs of finding a place to live. (Fran Lebowitz remembered when she came to New York City. And, she worked as a cab driver. As soon as she pocketed $129 she was set for the rest of the month!

Gee, I remember back in the 1970's, you got theater tickets for less than $5. There were always discounts. And, the shows were excellent.

That's what kept New York City great for the longest time!

The rich? They don't make a city great, that's for sure.; 9/11/11, 10:11 PM
Mark O said...: Please explain why with all our firepower we have to live with defiance and not victory. Why does Obama suggest we have won while I have to be searched like a criminal at the airport and my kids can't walk down the terminal to see me off. We have not won. We are losing. The panic in NY this weekend is Exh. A.; 9/11/11, 10:18 PM
Cedarford said...: Scott said...
The advantage of being a stateless political entity is that you can't launch nuclear missiles at them.

==================
A myth. As wars go, even the Al Qaeda part of the Islamoids is a pretty low level affair in terms of lethality. Barely over a 15th of the casualties we took in Vietnam, a 25th if you factor in ARVN, Aussies, and S Koreans. So it "isn't worth it" to launch a major war on their sponsors.
Iraq was a near basket case, wasn't keen on AQ, and that fiasco nearly cost us a trillion dollars and 3500 dead not from AQ, but very angry Sunnis and the Shiite proxies of Iran.

But if the Islamoids used nukes? That would have a nation that sponsored them..and that nation could be smoked.

=================
BTW - The engineering analysis and video show the South Tower crumpled down all the way to the ground in 10 seconds. The North Tower took 15 seconds, but that is because the collapse process includes some time where the Tower started to fail but leaned, as some good I-beams held up the point where the pancaking and piledriving effect took over.; 9/11/11, 10:25 PM
edutcher said...: Compare what happened at the Jets game to Nanny Bloomberg's PC fest and Krugman's "conscience".

More and more, the people are rejecting the values of the ruling class.

And the ruling class is finally getting the message.

Mark O said...

Please explain why with all our firepower we have to live with defiance and not victory. Why does Obama suggest we have won while I have to be searched like a criminal at the airport and my kids can't walk down the terminal to see me off. We have not won. We are losing. The panic in NY this weekend is Exh. A.

We're not losing, but the malign neglect of what Fen called DHOTUS is attenuating the situation. As I say, the ruling class knows they're losing.

As to firepower, the same can be said for all the firepower of the Civil War being unable to beat the Indians in less than 25 years.; 9/12/11, 5:48 AM
Scott said...: Let me just say this generally about 9/11 truthers, global climate change evangelists, two-bullet Kennedy assasination truthers, and others of their ilk: Every measurement has a baseline. If you cannot define an incontrovertable objective baseline for your measurements, your statistics lie.

The time and place that each aircraft impacted the World Trade Center is incontrovertable enough so that one can say that "The South Tower collapsed in 56 minutes." and "The North Tower took 102 minutes" without being off the mark in a meaningful way.

But to float a figure like "Each tower came down in about 10 seconds" is either unprovable or just plain dumb because you can't establish, based on the sheer size of each building's mass, the beginning of the collapse. Much of the building's loss of structural integrity happened before the visible outer collapse; and the end point can't be determined within a second because the base of the building was shrouded in smoke.

Yes, there were catastrophic failures. Yes, certain events happened in short periods of time; and these events were visible.

But no, you can't say that "Each tower came down in about 10 seconds" or some such because you haven't clearly defined in an incontrovertable way when the collapse started.

We live in an era where public policy that affects people's lives in big, big ways is formulated by such "floating figures" -- precise sounding numbers with fuzzy or even imaginary baselines by people who can't do math beyond integers. The Global Cooling, then Global Warming, then Global Climate Change religionists have been wildly successful by lying with floating figures to achieve political ends.

I'm sick of this crap. It's time for people to call "bullshit" to floating figures. And I have.; 9/12/11, 6:05 AM
gerry said...: Thank you, Scott.; 9/12/11, 7:52 AM
Tibore said...: The 10 second figure comes from both the 9/11 Commision Report and the NIST study. The thing is, the 9/11 Commision Report was not an engineering study and was simply leaning on an interim NIST progress report. And NIST in turn wasn't measuring what people think they were measuring.

In the NCSTAR writeup, NIST was not reporting collapse time from measuring the fall of the floors where the collapses initiated to the ground. Rather, they were measuring nothing more than the time for exterior panels that had peeled off the building to hit the ground (for the North Tower, that was estimated to be 11 seconds; for the South, 9). That's not really a measure of anything other than disconnected components falling, and it's certainly not a significant piece of data; the conclusions of the engineering study on the collapse does not depend on these times, and indeed leaves some room for uncertainty due to the inherently chaotic nature of the collapse. In the end, it is actually not possible to determine the precise time of the point where the collapse initiation floors hit the ground because those are obscured by the enormous dust clouds created by the collapse.

Truthers try to take the NIST figures and pretend that they signify the tops of the towers hitting the ground. This could not be further from the truth, as it clearly states in the NIST report what they were measuring. That's why you get the conspiracy myths of "free fall" (and for the particularly idiotic truthers, "faster than free fall"). None of that blathering is to be paid attention to; it is no more than people pretending to know more than they do.

In the end, the precise time of the collapse is not relevant unless you're a truther seeking to nitpick minutiae. Have a column hold out just a fraction of a second longer, have a single floor's truss manage to keep its welds intact for just a blink of an eye, and you actually have a different collapse time. What's more important to understand is the collapse mechanism, and why the towers design ended up being susceptible to the particular combination of fires, impact damage, and eccentric loads. There's certainly nothing suspicious about it, all truther blathering to the contrary.; 9/12/11, 7:59 AM
Tibore said...: And getting back to the thread's topic: Why defiance? I read a short missive from a former FDNY firefighter now residing in Florida where he spent the day back in Manhattan hauling toasts to old comrades and catching up on everyone else's life since then. He and his buddies were celebrating life and the fact that they had much to be proud of in rushing in to save people in the towers.

Defiance defines a person in relation to the object they are being defiant at. That makes a person a slave of that object. These guys were celebrating their survival and their creed. That defines ones self as an individual in control of what they do and what attitudes to hold in life. Seems to me to be a better way of going about things.; 9/12/11, 8:15 AM
Shouting Thomas said...: Defiance would have been rebuilding those towers 100 stories higher within a year of 9/11.

Instead, we got The Hole at The Center, as described by Mark Steyn.; 9/12/11, 8:18 AM
Fred4Pres said...: Makes the disputes in Wisconsin seem rather silly doesn't it?; 9/12/11, 8:50 AM
David said...: Ten seconds from the time the actual collapse started, Scott (you argumentative pedant.) Just about everyone but you understands the starting point for that interval. It didn't have to be stated.

The ten seconds came from my own timing of the tape. Last night. Which, I find from other comments, agrees with the 9-11 commission.

I also saw it on TV in real time in 2001. It was horrible and seemed a lot longer than 10 seconds. But for some, those trapped above the points of impact, it was also merciful.; 9/12/11, 5:45 PM