Dave Klain @DaveKlain

A reminder: There is not a single reputable study linking vaccines to autism. There are dozens, including examinations of *entire populations*, that show no relation. None. Nada. Zilch. The rest is just antivaxx noise.

Your regular reminder: If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.

As we all know, NCOs run the military. I can't count the number of times I went to a CPO and said, "Chief, we need to do such-and-such. What do you suggest?" Quite often the response is, "Leave it to me, sir. We'll get it done." At the same time, the responsibility falls on the shoulders of the officers. I remember when I was a newly-minted Ensign, straight out of USNA. I was TAD to NAS Los Alamitos waiting for my flight school class to start. The CO of the reserve squadron to which I was attached tasked me to attend an AFCEA (Armed Forces Communication and Electronics Association) convention that was taking place in LA. Besides meeting Omar Bradley, one of the high points of the meeting was when I was introduced to the Sergeant Major of the Army - the top enlisted man in that service. I had been commissioned for maybe two months at that point. As I was talking with him, he kept calling me 'sir.' It was extremely embarrassing for me. Here I was talking with the top enlisted man in the USA, a man of exceptional bravery and commitment to our country, and he kept calling me 'sir.' I knew why he was doing it. He was reminding me that I was no longer a Midshipman at the Academy. I was now a commissioned officer, with all the responsibility that entails. To say it was one of the most sobering moments of my life is an understatement. So the military changed us all, just in different ways. All who served should be immensely proud of their service and the person you became because of it. To all who served, and for those who supported those who did, God bless you and yours.

This person is friends with Trump.

They sit back, and do nothing. Watching Trump destroy the very country we elected them to serve.

She never called her family to say goodbye. Instead, Sara Low used her final 30 minutes to make sure the FBI knew who attacked America. Trapped at 30,000 feet with no weapon, 28-year-old flight attendant Sara Low held the only tool that could expose the 9/11 hijackers to the world: 14 numbers memorized in her head. When terrorists stormed the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 11, chaos erupted in the cabin. Flight attendant Amy Sweeney scrambled to grab an onboard airphone to alert the ground team, but hit a devastating wall - she didn't have a calling card to bypass the system lock. Without her wallet on hand, Sara stepped forward. She didn't have plastic, but she had clarity. She had memorized her family’s AT&T calling card digits. Sara handed those numbers to Amy, unlocking a lifeline to the ground. For the next 20 minutes, Amy stayed on the line with American Airlines flight services in Boston. Because of Sara's calling card, the FBI received its very first concrete intelligence of the day: exact seat numbers of the hijackers, physical descriptions, and their movements in the cabin. While Amy relayed the critical data, Sara spent her final half-hour moving terrified passengers toward the rear of the plane, shielding them from danger. Sara had the means to use that airphone. She could have called her parents. She could have said a final goodbye to her sister. She didn't. She chose to make sure the world would know the truth instead. True heroism isn't defined by muscle or weapons. It’s defined by presence of mind in the face of impossible terror - and the selfless decision of who that mind chooses to serve. #archaeohistories

After September 11, more than a million tons of the World Trade Center was loaded onto barges and shipped to a garbage dump on Staten Island. Then hundreds of men and women stood at conveyor belts for ten months and picked through every ounce of it by hand. They were looking for people. The place is called Fresh Kills. For fifty years it was the largest landfill in the world. It took its last barge of household trash on March 22, 2001, and shut down for good. New York was finally done with it. Five and a half months later, at two o'clock in the morning on September 12, the landfill's director got a phone call at home. He had just walked in the door. Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the World Trade Center. He drove back. The man who ran the dump would later say, without any drama, that if Fresh Kills had not been closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The garbage would have been in the way. The site was empty. So that is where the towers went. Here is how it worked. At Ground Zero, cranes and grapplers lifted the debris into dump trucks. The trucks drove to a pier on the Hudson. There, the load went onto barges, six hundred tons at a time. The barges were towed down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. More than fifteen hundred barges made the trip. At Fresh Kills, sanitation workers unloaded them onto a hill. And then the sorting began. The debris was mechanically screened into three sizes. Chunks bigger than eight inches. Two to eight inches. A quarter inch to two inches. Anything smaller than a quarter of an inch, the size of a fingernail, fell through the last sieve. Everything above that size went onto a conveyor belt. And along the belts stood the detectives. NYPD. FBI. Port Authority police. Medical examiners. Dressed head to toe in white Tyvek suits, in masks, in gloves, on a hill that stank of jet fuel and pulverized concrete and things nobody wanted to name. Looking down at the belt, hour after hour, as the towers rolled past them a fist-sized chunk at a time. When they saw something, they reached in and took it, and placed it in a white bucket at their feet. A wedding ring. A photo ID. A set of keys. A shoe. A piece of a person. The white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue. The volume was beyond comprehension. In mid-September the operation was processing 1,750 tons of debris a day. By mid-October, 17,500 tons a day. Ten times more. Round the clock. The 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months. A retired NYPD detective later wrote down what a shift looked like, because almost nobody outside knew it existed. You wake at 3 a.m. You get a giant coffee. You drive two hours in the dark from Orange County, through New Jersey, to Staten Island. You park at the bottom of a hill that looks like the end of the world. You put on the white suit. You go to your belt. You stand there. You look. Then you drive two hours home and do it again tomorrow. Sanitation workers pulled sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. One of them, a supervisor named Barry Asnes, said afterward what kept him there. We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal. The operation did not stop for weather. It did not stop for Christmas. It ran until July 2002. Ten months. By the end, the men and women on that hill had recovered thousands of human remains. Tens of thousands of personal effects. Wallets, badges, wedding bands, photographs, all cleaned and catalogued and returned to families who had nothing else to bury. When they were finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section of the landfill, a mound two hundred and twenty-five feet high, and covered. It is a park now. Many of the men and women who stood on that hill have lung disease. Asthma. Cancer. PTSD. The air they were breathing, eight and ten and sixteen hours a day, was full of the towers. Some of them have died of it. Almost nobody knows their names. Almost nobody knows the place. Mention Fresh Kills and 9/11 in the same sentence, the retired detective wrote, and most people will have no idea what you are talking about. Here is what you should know. Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified. Every one of those identifications came out of a white bucket. Every wedding ring returned to a widow. Every badge returned to a firehouse. Every fragment of bone matched to a name and buried with a headstone instead of a question mark. Somebody in a white suit, standing at a belt on a garbage dump at four in the morning, reached into the World Trade Center as it rolled past, and picked that person up, and put them in a bucket, and sent them home. They did that for ten months. Nobody applauded on the hill. There was nobody to watch. They did it anyway. 🇺🇸

“"Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I'm on an airplane that's been hijacked. If things don't go well, and it's not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have good times. Same to my parents and everybody, and I just totally love you, and I'll see you when you get there," Sweeney said”

I agree.

On this 25th anniversary of the attacks on the United States on 9/11, we honour the memory of all those who lost their lives In that moment of darkness, Allies stood together. For the first and only time in #NATO’s history, we invoked Article 5 America’s friends and Allies in NATO stood with you then and we stand with you today

As US Ambassador to NATO on 9/11, the first to call me to suggest we invoke Article 5 was Canadian Ambassador David Wright. Our allies came to our rescue that terrible day. I’ll call David this morning 25 years later to thank him and our great neighbor Canada once again!

Today, we honour and remember those who lost their lives in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States 25 years ago. NATO Allies stood together then and today. #NeverForget #September11

German journalist posed as a Putin supporter to expose Kremlin agents Journalist Angelique Geray ran a fake channel for several months under the name “Katya” — a Russia supporter. She posted videos featuring the Russian flag and soon received assignments from people who contacted her. She was asked to photograph sites in Germany, monitor people from the CDU, arms companies and NGOs, as well as collect the personal data of their employees. The recruitment of “one-time agents” often begins with simple tasks for small amounts of money. For example, they may be asked to take a photo, pick up a package or obtain a SIM card. The assignments then become more serious. Communication is mainly conducted through Telegram, and each operative knows only their part of the operation. German politician Jovica Jovitch from the pro-Russian Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance reached out to “Katya’s” channel. He gave advice on developing the channel. For example, the politician suggested making a video of “Katya” dancing on a NATO flag. When asked about links to Russian intelligence services, Jovitch replied that theoretically he knew nothing, but practically he did. He later denied having any ties to Russian intelligence. After Geray revealed her fake identity, unknown individuals threatened to kill her.

New York City, 25 years later

The son of Michael Massaroli with a powerful message today at the 9/11 memorial in NYC: "You do my dad's legacy and the legacy of all these victims no honor by using this tragedy to spread hate," he said. "I've had to grow up and spend the past 25 years seeing people use it to hate on our Muslim brothers and sisters, to hate on people who don't look like them."

I post this every year on 9/11. Never forget.

Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski

4 years ago

Trump initial reaction to 9/11 was to claim that he now owned the tallest building in downtown Manhattan.

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Went to the pentagon 9/11 memorial today (didn’t want to have anything to do with yesterday’s political event. 25 years ago, CAPT Bob Dolan and CDR Bill Donovan, two good friends on the OPNAV staff were killed when the plane hit. I miss them both. #911Anniversary #neverforget

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My Lord. @JoeBiden, 83 years old, battling Stage 4 cancer that has spread to his bones, stood for HOURS alongside @DrBiden as the names of 9/11 victims were read. Donald Trump fell asleep at the 9/11 event at the Pentagon. One showed respect despite his pain. The other couldn't even stay awake. Trump is an embarrassment to the nation and the office he holds. Really says it all.

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“Fun fact” Since Roe v Wade was overturned, more women have been prosecuted for miscarriages than men for being in the Epstein files. Over 31 to 0.