Today is 9/11. A day to be remembered or feared ???

[krsna]

A day of infamy in the history of madness.

Why? Time to get serious about Nama-bhajan ?

 

 

 

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[theist]

 

A day of infamy in the history of madness.

Why? Time to get serious about Nama-bhajan ?

 

 

Infamy, for sure. The why is self evident. It is always time to get serious about Nama-bhajan. The calm peaceful times are even more dangerous if it makes us more lackadaisical towards our chanting.

 

Amazingly nothing seems to work on me. Truly dull.

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

From www.911timeline.net

 

Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded very interesting seismic activity on September 11, 2001 that has still not been explained.

 

While the aircraft crashes caused minimal earth shaking, significant earthquakes with unusual spikes occurred at the beginning of each collapse. The Palisades seismic data recorded a 2.1 magnitude earthquake during the 10-second collapse of the South Tower at 9:59:04 and a 2.3 quake during the 9-second collapse of the North Tower at 10:28:31.

 

The Palisades seismic record shows that -- as the collapses began -- a huge seismic "spikes" marked the moment the greatest energy went into the ground. The strongest jolts were both registered at the beginning of the collapses, well before the falling debris struck the earth.

 

These unexplained "spikes" in the seismic data tends to lend credence to the theory that perhaps a massive explosion(s) in the lowest level of the basements where the supporting steel columns of the WTC met the bedrock caused the collapses.

 

A "sharp spike of short duration" is how seismologist Thorne Lay of University of California at Santa Cruz told AFP an underground nuclear explosion appears on a seismograph.

The two unexplained spikes are more than twenty times the amplitude of the other seismic waves associated with the collapses and occurred in the East-West seismic recording as the buildings began to fall.

 

In the basements of the collapsed towers, where the 47 central support columns connected with the bedrock, hot spots of "literally molten steel" were discovered. Such persistent and intense residual heat, 70 feet below the surface, could explain how these crucial structural supports failed.

 

Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of Flushing, New York, told AFP that he saw pools of "literally molten steel" at the World Trade Center. Tully was contracted on September 11 to remove the debris from the site.

Tully called Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Maryland, for consultation about removing the debris. CDI calls itself "the innovator and global leader in the controlled demolition and implosion of structures." Loizeaux, who cleaned up the bombed Federal Building in Oklahoma City, arrived on the WTC site two days later and wrote the clean-up plan for the entire operation.

 

AFP asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on the site. "Yes," he said, "hot spots of molten steel in the basements." These incredibly hot areas were found "at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven [basement] levels," Loizeaux said. The molten steel was found "three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed," Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously at 5:20 on September 11th.

 

Construction steel has an extremely high melting point of about 2800° Fahrenheit (1535° Celsius). Asked what could have caused such extreme heat, Tully said, "Think of the jet fuel."

 

A way to prove that explosives had blasted the supporting steel columns of the Twin Towers would be to examine fragments from them among the debris for evidence of what metallurgists call "twinning". While steel is often tested for evidence of explosions, despite numerous eyewitness reports of explosions in the towers, the engineers involved in the FEMA-sponsored building assessment did no such tests.

 

The WTC debris was removed as fast as possible and no forensic examination of the debris was permitted by the FBI or any other government agency. Almost all the 300,000 tons of steel from the Twin Towers was sold to New York scrap dealers and exported to places like China and Korea as quickly as it could be loaded onto the ships, thereby removing the evidence.

 

The magazine Fire Engineering, a respected journal of firefighting for 125 years, which publishes studies of catastrophic fires, criticized the American Society of Civil Engineers and FEMA investigations as "a half-baked farce." Fire Engineering editor WiIliam A. Manning wrote in the January issue: "...the structural damage from the planes and the explosive ignition of jet fuel in themselves were not enough to bring down the towers." Why is such there disparity in opinion within the ranks of the fire-engineering community?

 

The immense clouds of dust and apparent disintegration of the 425,000 cubic yards of concrete of the World Trade Center cause me to question the MIT account of events. Describing the ruins, television evangelist Dr. Robert Schuller said that "...there was not a single block of concrete in that rubble." One observer described the scene "as if some high-energy disintegration beam or laser had been focused on the towers and pulverized the concrete into minute particles of ash and dust." The 110-ten-story World Trade Center reduced to dust by jet fuel?

 

Dr. Michael Baden, New York state's chief forensic pathologist and an expert in pathology said in September that most of the victims' bodies should be identifiable, because the fires had not reached the 3200°F for 30 minutes necessary to incinerate a body. At a November press conference, Dr. Charles Hirsch, the chief medical examiner, told grieving relatives that many bodies had been "vaporized." Are we to believe that the people killed on 9/11 were "vaporized" at 1700° F?

 

The World Trade Center smoldering pits of molten steel burned for exactly 100 days, despite the constant spray of water being applied. The fires were finally reported extinguished on December 19.

 

Also, the collapses of the south tower at 9:59:04 took only 10 seconds while the collapse of the north tower at 10:28:31 took only 9 seconds, this is only slightly more than a free fall from the same height, indicating that there was very little resistance. Yet the floors themselves are quite robust, each one is 39" thick; the top 4" is a poured concrete slab, with interlocking vertical steel trusses underneath. This steel would absorb a lot of kinetic energy by crumpling as one floor fell onto another. So how did both of the towers fall so quickly?

 

In a newly release audio, two of New York City’s Bravest are heard to have made it up to where United Airlines Flight 175 impacted, the 78th floor. Their voices where calm, they explain what was needed to help the many causalities and to put out the two small fires that they discovered. The type of fire that these two NYC Firemen describe does not seem to jive at all with the inferno that is blamed for melting the support beams and bringing down the first steel high-rise or skyscraper ever.

 

Also, Louie Cacchioli 51, another NYC firefighter, assigned to Engine 47 in Harlem, has stated on September 11, 2001: "We were the first ones in the second tower after the plane struck. I was taking firefighters up in the elevator to the 24th floor to get in position to evacuate workers. On the last trip up a bomb went off. We think there were bombs set in the building. I had just asked another firefighter to stay with me, which was a good thing because we were trapped inside the elevator and he had the tools to get out."

"There were probably 500 people trapped in the stairwell. It was mass chaos. The power went out. It was dark. Everybody was screaming. We had oxygen masks and we were giving people oxygen. Some of us made it out and some of us didn't. I know of at least 30 firefighters who are still missing. This is my 20th year. I am seriously considering retiring. This might have done it."

 

When cameraman and Jules Naudet arrived at WTC tower one along with other crews of NYC Firemen and entered the building's ground floor lobby, they were to a one completely puzzled, actually astonished, to find significant and widespread damage to the entire lobby area; although not of a deep, structural kind. Moreover, nowhere was there any indication whatsoever of an incendiary-type explosion or any kind of fire in this area.

 

Yet the incredible number of blown-out windows and other extensive though rather superficial damage throughout the lobby area was profoundly perplexing to these experienced professional firefighters in relation to the impact of the plane eighty stories above. As one put it: "The lobby looked like the plane hit the lobby!"

 

Other reports, from firemen, have said that the FBI’s offices in NYC that were on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th floors of the north tower of the WTC were totally destroyed, presumably by bombs.

[krsna]

Religion is a bloody disgrace

The Abrahamic family of faiths is now frighteningly dysfunctional

 

Tony Bayfield -- Saturday September 11, 2004 -- The Guardian

 

In 1982, I was down at an interfaith centre in the West Country. A friend, an Anglican priest, suggested we went to meet his bishop. Since this particular bishop lived in a proper palace, I was really up for the visit and spent a lot of time gawping at the moat, crenellated walls and power-portraits.

 

The bishop was charming but suggested, en passant, that the massacres at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps did not represent Judaism's finest hour. Being a small but bolshy Jew, I pointed out that the massacres had been perpetrated by Lebanese Christian militia and what did he have to say about that? He looked at me with genuine bemusement and said: "Obviously they weren't Christians because Christians don't do things like that. So I suppose we say, 'the blighters'."

 

I didn't think it was a terribly adequate response but it was only a couple of sentences in a long exchange about the common problems faced by Christianity and Judaism in Britain.

 

Even in the 1980s, Matthew Arnold's 150-year-old Dover Beach poem about the tide of faith receding still deafened us all. We worried about the death of God, being honest to God, and religion evaporating into the secular air. Perhaps that's why it didn't seem to us to play a significant part in most of the troubles of the world - with Belfast and Jerusalem as only partial exceptions. I remember giving sermons about the derivation of the Hebrew word for war - milchamah - which is from the word lechem, bread. The Marxists, I said, had a point when they saw economics as the basis for all struggle. It's poverty, not religion, that is the problem "out there". But the real problem, here where it matters, is the receding tide of faith.

 

With hindsight, I can see what a staggeringly insular perspective it was. Because faith is not on the retreat from most of the beaches of the world, only in northern Europe; because religion continues to be a hugely significant factor in global conflict. What is happening today isn't new, it's just that we faith leaders in this country didn't see it, didn't see what was coming and didn't have a clue as to our part in it all.

 

Nineteen years later, Tony Blair consulted 25 faith leaders at Downing Street shortly after September 11, but before we went into Afghanistan. It was a touch harder to be blind to global realities. Indeed, I did wonder out loud why he was wasting his time on religion, which seems to me to have come far too close to discrediting itself for anyone's comfort, let alone God's.

 

We have singularly failed to face up to the inescapable truth that faiths only exist relationally. That is that they simply cannot continue posturing as monopolistic corporations, smugly proclaiming themselves as the finished article, the last word and the ultimate truth. They surely should have discovered by now their own provisionality, fragmentary nature and deep flaws.

 

It is bizarre that we should still affirm a God who would bestow the totality of Her truth on any one group of human beings, and still more bizarre that we should believe in groups of human beings as being capable of grasping the totality of God's truth. Yet when my great friend Rabbi Jonathan Sacks tried to say this in a very, very mild and cautious form the outcry within a section of his own constituency almost overwhelmed him.

 

We have made desperately poor progress on the practical agenda of pooling what is best in our respective traditions for the good of humanity and the globe because we cannot bring ourselves to face up to the theological disclosure implicit in our diversity.

 

In fact, though most religious traditions are big on humility in theory, we do not seem to have a clue what it means. I half-expect to be invited to an international conference on humility and religion in which there are endless papers seeking to demonstrate in which faith the concept of humility originated and who should be awarded the gold medal for being the most humble.

 

But clinging to old imperialistic and triumphal notions in the face of glaring reality is not the only charge against us. We have utterly failed to stand up against the fearful, exploitative and reactionary forces - to be labelled for shorthand and convenience purposes only as "fundamentalist" - and allowed them to dominate each of us and the world stage perhaps as never before. I hope it is sufficient to say "settlers", "far-right churches in America", and "Islamic extremists" for us to be clear about whom I am talking.

 

The alibis and excuses - they are not really Christians or Muslims because proper Christians or Muslims do not believe/do those things; you mustn't tar everyone with the same brush, some of them are nice, sincere, peace-loving people; people are entitled to their beliefs, you should listen to them; or, worst of all, "What can we do?" - simply underline our moral and spiritual bankruptcy. Wimps, the lot of us.

 

In fact, the situation is getting worse and worse. Except in northern Europe, both Christianity and Islam are growing at a rate so staggering that Matthew Arnold must be spinning. What is emerging is a phenomenon that the Anglican theologian John Bowden has described as "terrifying", forms of faith that are "very hostile to other faiths and driven by a sense of malevolent activity by hostile powers that have to be combated". Religion which is aggressive, triumphalist and thrives on conflict.

 

Even in Judaism, which is far too small to consider converting Africa or the Far East, it is the "born again" proponents of inerrancy who read the texts as divine licence to advance and impose their views by whatever means are necessary.

 

I look at Indonesia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, the Balkans and Sudan, and each instance of bloody conflict has a strong religious dimension. The people involved are Muslims, Christians and Jews, however much they may be behaving in a way that the best or main thrust of their respective traditions contradicts.

 

Lest you jump to the conclusion that I am a naive pacifist, I am not. My Jewish experience tells me that oppression and subjugation don't go away if you acquiesce. Nor am I a self-hating anti-Zionist. I am a Zionist who believes that unless two, viable states are established in Israel/Palestine, the very future of Judaism is threatened and time is rapidly running out.

 

What I do argue is that all faiths, particularly the embarrassingly dysfunctional Abrahamic family, have to acknowledge that no faith tradition is supreme, that no one has a monopoly on God or truth, and that the reality of pluralism discloses a theological obligation to be humble and self-critical, to pool resources, to work together for the good of humanity and the globe rather than fuel its blight and destruction.

 

If only we were able to assert a shared platform that transcended the platitudinous, to stand up to those who pervert our traditions, and to work together for a justice that involves compromise and humility, we might even end up stemming the decline of faith in northern Europe. By demonstrating that religion still offers meaning, purpose and human values, rather than being at best an irrelevance or at worst a bloody disgrace.

 

· Rabbi Tony Bayfield is the head of the Movement for Reform Judaism

 

www.reformjudaism.org.uk