Did you know Paul’s Thing has a YouTube channel? Donna gave me a GoPro for Christmas several years ago, and I started sharing clips of bicycle and motorcycle rides on YouTube. Those videos are still there, if you’re interested.
Regular readers of my blog know my interests have shifted from risking life and limb on two wheels to wristwatches. Seven months ago, I recorded two desktop watch videos with an iPhone. They were okay but could have been better, so I fished out the GoPro, put it on a tripod, plugged in a clip-on mic, and started using that instead. My watch show & tells are still awkward and amateurish, but they’re getting better. As of yesterday, I’m up to ten:
| Watch Show & Tell Videos by Paul: |  |
Each video is also on TikTok. You may well ask why, and the honest answer is because so many watch influencers use the platform (not that I’m trying to influence anyone). If you’re depraved enough to favor TikTok over YouTube, here’s the link.
What have I got to show for all this? Views and a few positive comments, always nice, but mainly satisfaction in branching out from blogging to vlogging. Old dog, new trick.
I”m happy the 25th anniversary of 9/11 is finally behind us. Is it just me, or have the ranks of truthers swelled over the years? If your only source of news is social media, you might think the majority of Americans believe Israel and the Deep State were behind the whole thing, for whatever purpose they never quite get around to saying.
I’m still angry the security experts we paid to anticipate terrorist tactics and attacks didn’t see planes being flown into skyscrapers and buildings coming, because I did, as far back as January 1995. That’s when I read in the newspapers about police in the Philippines uncovering what came to be known as the Bojinka Plot. A Manila apartment being used as a bomb factory caught fire, and in the rubble police discovered plans to kill the Pope during an upcoming visit; blow up 11 airliners in flight from Asia to the U.S. with the goal of killing approximately 4,000 passengers and shutting down air travel around the world; and crash a plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The mastermind behind the Bojinka Plot was none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principle planner behind the 9/11 attacks six years later.
Me in January 1995: “Flying a hijacked airliner into a building? That’s something new. I wonder if they’ll try that again some day?”
Okay, some security experts we paid to anticipate terrorist tactics and attacks did take a lesson from the Bojinka Plot, but no one would listen to them. Various FBI and DIA officials knew about Mohammed Atta and some of his fellow hijackers enrolling in flight training, but they didn’t share their concerns with other agencies. Basically, no one in a position to do anything to stop 9/11 was listening to warnings, and here I’m talking about two people in particular. Here’s what they had to say after 9/11:
George W. Bush: “It’s hard to envision a plot so devious as the one that they pulled off on 9/11. Never did we realize that the enemy was so well organized.”
Condoleeza Rice: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that those people could take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.”
Yeah, right,
I’ll confess that in the days and weeks following 9/11, I was embarrassed for the U.S. Air Force and its slow, confused response to the hijackings on the morning of 9/11. I sat five-minute air defense alert in NATO, Alaska, and Korea and flew several real-world scramble missions, so it was and remains a subject near and dear to my heart. On reflection, though, I realize the impossibility of the whole situation that morning. We were caught flat-footed and there just wasn’t time … as the 9/11 terrorists intended. And until we knew for sure these hijacked airliners were to be used as missiles against ground targets, which we didn’t know at first, imagine the reaction of a fighter pilot receiving orders to shoot down an airliner full of innocent passengers. Of course there actually were two fighter pilots prepared to do just that against United Airlines Flight 93, but that was the last hijacked airliner and by then we knew it was headed for DC with the intention of crashing it into Congress or the White House. Those two pilots, scrambled without missiles on their F-16s, were prepared to ram the airliner, which crashed in Pennsylvania before they got to it.
Is there anyone in the current administration listening to the experts paid to anticipate terrorist tactics and attacks today? Shit, do we still pay experts to do that, or did DOGE eliminate those jobs too? About the only thing we can count on is that if there’s another mass terrorist attack against America, it’ll be Joe Biden’s fault.
Well, shoot … I’m all for branching out, but I didn’t anticipate this blog post taking this direction when I fired up the iMac this morning.