It started out like any other morning. Just another Tuesday at the office. But little did anyone know that for the workers in the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, the residents of Manhattan, and the people of the United States and the rest of the globe, a horrible event would transpire that morning that would not only kill 3,000 people but would set in motion events that would change people’s attitudes towards the world, shape the foreign policies of many a country, bring down governments, and cement the 00s place in history as the decade of the War on Terrorism.

From WikiPedia:

The September 11, 2001 attacks (often referred to as 9/11) consisted of a series of coordinated terrorist suicide attacks by Islamic extremists on the United States of America on September 11, 2001. Nineteen terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners (United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11) into the World Trade Center in New York City, one plane into each tower (1 WTC and 2 WTC), resulting in the collapse of both buildings soon afterward and irreparable damage to nearby buildings. The hijackers crashed a third airliner (American Airlines Flight 77) into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Passengers and members of the flight crew on the fourth aircraft (United Airlines Flight 93) attempted to retake control of their plane from the hijackers; that plane crashed into a field near the town of Shanksville in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania. In addition to the 19 hijackers, 2,973 people died; another 24 are missing and presumed dead. The victims were predominantly civilians.

The terrorists reportedly took control of the aircraft by using knives and box-cutter knives to kill flight attendants and at least one pilot or passenger, including the captain of Flight 11, John Ogonowski.

Timeline of Events

American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767-200, crashed into the northern side of the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767-200, crashed into the South Tower at 9:02:59 a.m. EDT and was covered by live TV broadcasters.
American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757-200, crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37:46 a.m. EDT
United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757-200, crashed in a field in southwest Pennsylvania just outside of Shanksville, about 150 miles northwest of Washington, D.C., at 10:03:11 a.m. EDT. The crash in Pennsylvania resulted from the passengers of the airliner attempting to regain control from the hijackers.

The twin towers collapsed soon after due to structural failure.

The Terrorists

Collectively, nineteen attackers boarded the four planes. Fifteen of the attackers were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon.

Within 72 hours of the attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was able to identify the 19 deceased hijackers. Mohamed Atta’s luggage, which did not make the connection from his Portland flight onto American Airlines Flight 11, contained important clues about the hijackers and their plans.

On the day of the attacks, U.S. intelligence agencies also intercepted communications that pointed to Osama bin Laden. The United States government determined that al-Qaeda, headed by Osama bin Laden, bore responsibility for the attacks, with the FBI stating that evidence linking Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden to the attacks of September 11 is clear and irrefutable. The Government of the United Kingdom reached the same conclusion.

Motives

Statements of motives prior to September 11, 2001

Since 1996 Osama bin Laden has stated in public proclamations (fatwas) and in interviews with journalists his common list of grievances which he cites as the reason for his declaration of war against the U.S.

According to official U.S. government sources, the September 11 attacks were consistent with the mission statement of al-Qaeda. The overarching motivation for the present al-Qaeda campaign was set out in a 1998 fatwa issued by Osama bin Laden and others.

The fatwa lists three “crimes and sins” committed by the Americans:

* U.S. military occupation of the Arabian Peninsula.
* U.S. aggression against the Iraqi people.
* U.S. support of Israel.

The fatwa states that the United States:

* Plunders the resources of the Arabian Peninsula.
* Dictates policy to the rulers of those countries.
* Supports abusive regimes and monarchies in the Middle East, thereby oppressing their people.
* Has military bases and installations upon the Arabian Peninsula, which violates the Muslim holy land, in order to threaten neighboring Muslim countries.
* Intends thereby to create disunion between Muslim states, thus weakening them as a political force.
* Supports Israel, and wishes to divert international attention from (and tacitly maintain) the occupation of Palestine.

Lew Rockwell puts it succinctly:

Every close observer of the events of those days knows full well that these crimes were acts of revenge for US policy in the Muslim world. The CIA and the 911 Commission said as much, the terrorists themselves proclaimed it, and Osama underscored the point by naming three issues in particular: US troops in Saudi Arabia, US sanctions against Iraq, and US funding of Israeli expansionism.

Response

Nous sommes tous Américains

The attacks were denounced by mainstream media and governments worldwide, with the headline of France’s Le Monde newspaper summing up the international mood of sympathy: “We Are All Americans” .

Gratitude toward uniformed public-safety workers (dubbed “first responders”), and especially toward firefighters, was widely expressed in light of both the drama of the risks taken on the scene and the high death toll among the workers. Many police officers and rescue workers elsewhere in the country took leaves of absence to travel to New York City to assist in the grim process of recovering bodies from the twisted remnants of the Twin Towers. Blood donations also saw a surge in the weeks after 9/11.

Approximately one month after the attacks, the United States led a broad coalition of international forces in the removal of the Taliban regime for harboring the al-Qaeda organization. Pakistan provided the U.S. a number of military airports and bases for its attack on the Taliban regime and arrested over 600 supposed al-Qaeda members, whom it handed over to the U.S. Numerous countries, including the UK, India, Australia, France, Germany, Indonesia, China, Canada, Russia, Pakistan, Jordan, Mauritius, Uganda and Zimbabwe introduced “anti-terrorism” legislation.

Following the attacks, George W. Bush’s job approval rating soared to 86%. On September 20, 2001, the president spoke before the nation and a joint session of the United States Congress, regarding the events of that day, the intervening nine days of rescue and recovery efforts, and his intent in response to those events. In this speech he gave the remembered phrase Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

In addition, the highly visible role played by New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani won him high praise nationally and in New York.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the Bush administration declared a war on terrorism, with the stated goals of bringing Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to justice and preventing the emergence of other terrorist networks

Effects

The effects of September 11, 2001, were multi-fold.

Economic - When the stock markets reopened on September 17, (after the longest closure since the Great Depression in 1929), the Dow Jones Industrial Average index fell 684 points, or 7.1%, to 8920, its biggest-ever one-day point decline. By the end of the week, the DJIA had fallen 1369.7 points (14.3%), its largest one-week point drop in history. U.S. stocks lost $1.2 trillion in value for the week. As of 2007, Wall and Broad Streets near the New York Stock Exchange remained barricaded and guarded to prevent a physical attack upon the building. The economy of Lower Manhattan, which by itself is the third-largest business district in the United States was devastated.

Health - The toxic debris resulting from the collapse of the Twin Towers consisted of more than 2,500 contaminants: 50% nonfibrous material and construction debris; 40% glass and other fibers; 9.2% cellulose; and 0.8% asbestos, lead, and mercury. There were also unprecedented levels of dioxin and PAHs from the fires which burned for three months.

Cultural - Many motion pictures at the time that featured the Twin Towers had to either reshoot scenes of digitally remove the towers from the final print. This included Zoolander, Men in Black 2, and Spiderman. Documentaries and memorials were everywhere. The American flag made a resurgence, appearing on clothing and automobiles. Air travel became more difficult as security was tightened. The War on Terrorism began and with it came the USA PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security, and the color-coded security advisory system.

Whatever your political leaning, there can be no doubt that one cannot discuss the events of the beginning of the 21st century without discussing 9/11 and the issue of terrorism. The events of 9-11 have left an indelible mark upon the United States and the world.

2000, Zero Zero, Party Over, Oops, Outta time

Back in the 60s (er, I mean the 1960s), there was no Internet. Hard to believe, but it’s true - the Internet did not exist. In addition, there were no flat panel displays - people used these clunky monitor things that only presented output in this ugly green monochrome color. And they used - get this - punch cards! Computer memory was extremely expensive back then - so, naturally, computer programmers tried to cut as many corners as possible to save program space. These days, companies like Microsoft churn out bloated Windows code - hey, if your computer is too slow, just go to CompUSA and buy some more memory. But back then this wasn’t an option. One of the ways programmers saved space was to use two digits to represent the year, instead of four. You know, “73″ instead of “1973″, etc. In the old school programming days, people used COBOL (Completely Obsolete Boring Old Language), which processed numbers in their ASCII formats. It also used this bizarre thing called a PICTURE Clause, but really nobody in the world should ever be allowed to know about it. The C language had its issues too. A library function to retrieve the current year actually subtracted 1900 from the value, so in the year 2000 you could conceivably encounter a program that told you it was the year 100, which would really suck because they didn’t have television or microwave ovens in that year. This is the essence of what people in the late 90s called the Y2K Bug.

Bugging Out: The Y2K Problem

As Answers.com says:

Dates Are Critical
Many financial transactions match dates in database records with today’s date or with a future date. If the system does not handle dates correctly, bills do not get paid, notices do not get triggered and actions are not taken. After 2000, any system that could not recognize the millennium change caused erroneous output with applications that dealt with future dates.

What’s funny is that back in the day, programmers didn’t expect that their crappy programs would still be in use by the year 2000. What they didn’t understand is that all programmers throughout time are lazy. Why write a brand new crappy program if you can steal somebody else’s? With memory becoming cheaper, you could still have that mainframe operating awhile longer. And what about that function that returns dates? What about that customer database program? It’s dusty but it still works like a charm - no need to mess with it! And don’t forget the need for many programs to have backwards compatibility.

Alan Greenspan:

I’m one of the culprits who created this problem. I used to write those programs back in the 1960s and 1970s, and was proud of the fact that I was able to squeeze a few elements of space out of my program by not having to put a 19 before the year. Back then, it was very important. We used to spend a lot of time running through various mathematical exercises before we started to write our programs so that they could be very clearly delimited with respect to space and the use of capacity.It never entered our minds that those programs would have lasted for more than a few years. As a consequence, they are very poorly documented. If I were to go back and look at some of the programs I wrote 30 years ago, I would have one terribly difficult time working my way through step-by-step.

John Hamre, Deputy Secretary of Defense

The Y2K problem is the electronic equivalent of the El Niño and there will be nasty surprises around the globe.

The mainstream media and pop-culture jumped all over this Y2K Problem. The issue was ubiquitous in the year 1999.

My personal favorite is the Simpsons Halloween episode, where Homer forgot to check for the Y2K bug at the Springfield nuclear power plant.

Not everybody thought this was a problem, of course.

Computer programmers create actual, brilliant programs out of mere ideas in their heads. For them to go through millions of lines of old code (many armed with rapid, automated testing tools) to find every date-field is child’s play, not to mention damn dull. Oh-oh! — don’t forget about the million/billion/zillion embedded chips and embedded systems. These cannot be re-programmed or upgraded. These are molded into solid cement and are unchangeable. You cannot get out of bed without them. Examine how many are actually date-aware… You’ll find that most aren’t.

No matter… old timer COBOL programmers were overjoyed that their services were needed once again (talk about ensuring job security!).

Wiki:

Special committees were set up by governments to monitor remedial work and contingency planning, particularly by crucial infrastructures such as telecommunications, utilities and the like, to ensure that the most critical services had fixed their own problems and were prepared for problems with others. It was only the safe passing of the main “event horizon” itself, January 1, 2000, that fully quelled public fears.

What happened on January 1st, 2000?

Well, it seems Japan had the most issues:

• Ishikawa, Japan: radiation-monitoring equipment failed at midnight, but officials said there was no risk to the public.
• Onagawa, Japan: an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant at two minutes after midnight.
• Japan: at two minutes past midnight, Osaka Media Port, a telecommunications carrier, found errors in the date management part of the company’s network. The problem was fixed by 2:43 a.m. and no services were disrupted.
• Japan: NTT Mobile Communications Network reported on January 1 that some models of mobile telephones were deleting new messages received, rather than the older messages, as the memory filled up.
• Australia: bus-ticket-validation machines in two states failed to operate.
• USA: 150 slot machines at race tracks in Delaware stopped working.
• USA: the web site of the U.S. Naval Observatory, which runs the master clock that keeps the country’s official time, reported that the date was Jan. 1, 19100.
• France: the web site of the national weather forecasting service, Meteo France, displayed a map of Saturday’s weather forecast with the date 01/01/19100.

Otherwise, life went on as usual.

As Y2KHoax says:

Planes did not fall out of the sky, elevators did not drop, governments did not collapse. The Year 2000 arrived with a yawn.

The total cost of the work done in preparation for Y2K was 300 billion US dollars. Whether it was worth it is a contested issue. Many people saw the Y2K bug as hype and fear-mongering, one of many end-of-the-world scenarios that was bound to crop up the closer the world got to 2000. Others felt justified, since not much happened on January 1st (because we fixed the problem, see!). We may never know what effect the upgrades may have had or didn’t have, but one thing’s for certain - COBOL still sucks.

The following are excerpts from Bill Clinton’s 2000 State of the Union Speech:

(full version can be read here, here, here, and here)

You can listen to the speech by clicking these links:

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mp3 format

Coverage of the speech at PBS is here.
CNN coverage.

Editor Note:

Bill Clinton had a tendency to be long-winded in his speeches, so I wanted to try to edit down his 2000 address to be more accessible. However, due to the sheer number of proposals in the speech, I find that I can only edit it down so much. (This must be a record for the number of “We will”s, “I ask you”s, and “I propose”s this speech contains). As the Washington Post observed: Clinton’s 2000 State of the Union address marked a return to the activist agenda he outlined in his first speeches to Congress, before the GOP took over Congress in the 1994 elections and the president declared in his 1996 State of the Union that the "era of big government is over."

CNN commented that Clinton was interrupted 128 times for applause during his 89-minute address — his longest yet, beating his 1995 address by eight minutes.

I have taken the liberty of bolding passages I found particularly interesting….

Bill Gordon

***

We are fortunate to be alive at this moment in history. Never before has
our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with
so little internal crisis and so few external threats. Never before
have we had such a blessed opportunity — and, therefore, such a profound
obligation — to build the more perfect union of our founders’ dreams.

We begin the new century with over 20 million new jobs; the fastest economic
growth in more than 30 years; the lowest unemployment rates in 30 years;
the lowest poverty rates in 20 years; the lowest African American and Hispanic
unemployment rates on record; the first back-to-back budget surpluses in
42 years. And next month, America will achieve the longest period of economic
growth in our entire history. We have built a new economy. And our economic
revolution has been matched by a revival of the American spirit: crime
down by 20 percent, to its lowest level in 25 years; teen births down seven
years in a row; adoptions up by 30 percent; welfare rolls cut in half to
their lowest levels in 30 years.

Eight years ago, it was not so clear to most Americans there would be much to
celebrate in the year 2000. Then our nation was gripped by economic distress,
social decline, political gridlock. The title of a best-selling book asked:
“America: What Went Wrong?” In the best traditions of our nation, Americans
determined to set things right. We restored the vital center, replacing
outmoded ideologies with a new vision anchored in basic, enduring values:
opportunity for all, responsibility from all, a community of all Americans.
We reinvented government, transforming it into a catalyst for new ideas
that stress both opportunity and responsibility, and give our people the
tools they need to solve their own problems. With the smallest federal
work force in 40 years, we turned record deficits into record surpluses,
and doubled our investment in education. We cut crime, with 100,000 community
police and the Brady law, which has kept guns out of the hands of half
a million criminals. We ended welfare as we knew it, requiring work while
protecting health care and nutrition for children, and investing more in
child care, transportation, and housing to help their parents go to work.
We’ve helped parents to succeed at home and at work, with family leave,
which 20 millions Americans have now used to care for a newborn child or
a sick loved one. We’ve engaged 150,000 young Americans in citizen service
through AmeriCorps, while helping them earn money for college. In 1992,
we just had a road map; today, we have results.

But even more important, America again has the confidence to dream big dreams.
But we must not let this confidence drift into complacency. For we, all
of us, will be judged by the dreams and deeds we pass on to our children.
And on that score, we will be held to a high standard, indeed, because
our chance to do good is so great. My fellow Americans, we have crossed
the bridge we built to the 21st century. Now, we must shape a 21st century
American revolution — of opportunity, responsibility and community. We
must be now, as we were in the beginning, a new nation.

Read more…

2006 Top Songs

Daniel Powter’s Bad Day made it to the top of the year-end charts.

The 2006 top songs are compiled from various sources in no particular order:
Daniel Powter - Bad Day
Natasha Bedingfield - Unwritten
James Blunt - You’re Beautiful
Nickelback - Photograph
Nelly Furtado - Promiscuous
Pussycat Dolls - Buttons
Cassie - Me&U
Nine Inch Nails - Every Day Is Exactly The Same
Sean Paul - Temperature
Shakira Featuring Wyclef Jean - Hips Don’t Lie
Justin Timberlake - SexyBack

Other 2006 Top Songs:

ZeroZeros Personal List of Top Urban Tunes of 2006

These are the R&B/hip-hop/urban tracks we liked in 2006:

Gnarls Barkley - Music*Plus

1. Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
Danger Mouse with Cee-Lo Green. Can’t go wrong now, can you?

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Lady Sovereign - Fling on an ADIDAS hoodie and just boogie woogie

2. Lady Sovereign - Hoodie / Love Me or Hate Me [tie]
It’s a tie. We also like Public Warning, Random..look, just get the whole album Public Warning. Lady Soverign, M.I.A., Dizzee Rascal… U.K. is where it’s at.

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3. Mr. Nogatco - Bionic Fuse / Dr. Octagon - Aliens (Subfocus Remix) [tie]
Kool Keith is back to rap about Space and Mars. (Spell Nogatco backwards, duh!). Get the whole album Nogatco Rd.. The Aliens tune in its original form is fine but the Subfocus mix is wonderful drum’n'bass. We might also suggest the album Project Polaroid.

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4. T.I. - What You Know
Produced by some dude named Toomp(!). This is Dirty South at its finest. What you know about that?

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5. Yung Joc - Goin’ Down / I Know You See It [tie]
Another tie. The first time we heard Yung Joc we knew right away he was from Hotlanta. Just try not to sing along with “I Know You See It”. Throw some D’s on the Caddy and meet us at the mall.

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6. DJ Unk - Walk It Out
Another huge Atlanta tune. Man, we don’t even live in Atlanta… honest!

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7. Young Dro - Shoulda Lean
More big-bass dirty south music. We’re starting to see a pattern here.

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8. Chamillionaire featuring Krayzie Bone - Ridin’
Cops always tryin’ to catch us ridin’ dirty, too! Haters!

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9. Justin Timberlake - SexyBack
He brought it back and we can’t believe it. A DJ friend of ours said “Watch what happens when I throw this on.” She threw it on the decks and the whole dance floor blew up. There are some good mixes of the song out there as well.

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10. Lil Jon featuring E-40 and Sean Paul - Snap Yo Fingers
More laid back beats and simple synthesizers. We are positive this stuff is bad for us. Damn you, Lil Jon.

2006 Top Songs: Honorable Mentions:

Jibbs - Chain Hang Low

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D4L - Laffy Taffy