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You banish even your best friends if they are inviting dissension.
My only rule is 'no personal attacks'.
LOL.
Yeah, I think a lot of us could.
Celebrating St. Paddy's day tonight?
How about in your second week as moderator? -g
Would you like the honor of starting us off for the week, Phil?
I MIGHT go out with you after all this...just what did you have in mind? Is it Dutch?
I'm very happily married to a kind man, but I appreciate the offer.
The only posts I deleted were those in which you called me or Charley Mike names, ola, and I gave you a warning and examples from your own posts as to what constitutes a personal attack in my book.
If you are unwilling or unable to post on my thread without invective, maybe you should look for another place to share your wisdom.
Well I don't know about that, you big strong heterosexual man, we little women can understand false accusations when we see them.
Just the facts, my friend.
Excuse me? Please show me the post where I said those words.
Your paranoia is showing.
No one is yelling for your blood, Ola. I've asked you simply to refrain from personal attacks on my thread.
I'm glad you're having fun today, ola, and saddened that it's at other peoples' expense.
Your "champion" is getting the best of the competition and you are stepping in to tie one hand behind my back.
I have no 'champion' here. I know Charley Mike as well as I know you.
His references to possible negative aspects of my person not withstanding?
There is a large difference between 'references to possible negative aspects' and a personal attack, like calling someone a cow, for exapmle.
Apparently the private messages I am receiving from other posters at this moment in support of my position and descriptions of your INTOLERANT little group are correct?
Now let me guess just who might be sending you PM's about my "intolerance"..... No, why don't you tell us?
Here is your personal attack warning.
You are as common as cows and about as limited.
as Charley plays to an audience of one: Poet.
I am sure the women are just swooning over your posts Charley.
What do you think Charley might be saying that women find worth listening to?
Hi ola,
I agree with with you on this:
Might doesn't make you right.
But neither do lengthy and sometimes incoherent rants.
Charley Mike asked you some good questions in his last post to do. I'm looking forward to reading your answers.
I really like the way you said this:
Intolerance is both sides of the blade that carves civilization apart.
LOL! Well, it's only 7:30 here and my husband just put the coffeepot in the refrigerator, so you're in good company.
This morning's NY Times has a good article on where things stand at Ground Zero:
March 17, 2002
In Last Piles of Rubble, Fresh Pangs of Loss
By ERIC LIPTON and JAMES GLANZ
They are reaching the end of the line at ground zero. Picks still clang against rusted steel, spades still dig into pulverized concrete, backhoes still pour yet more contorted steel into flatbed trucks. And in a rush of recent discoveries, more human remains have been uncovered in the last several days than in many weeks.
But the unforgiving truth is, they are running out of dirt to sift through at the World Trade Center site. The once monstrous task of debris removal and body recovery has come down to little more than a hill or two.
And so a remarkable mood has taken hold through the bright mornings and the cold, clear nights, one not experienced before during the nonstop work and permanent fatigue. It is the feel of something at once depressing and darkly beautiful, and of a kind of twofold regret.
The discoveries of the bodies have made the workers, firefighters and construction bosses feel the sense of loss fresh and raw once more. But as the shovels start to scrape the naked bedrock, there is the odd sensation, despite the exhaustion, of not wanting to let go ? an awkward apprehension that the battlefield community of the pit will soon break up.
"It's not over, but it's definitely winding down," said Firefighter Keith J. Dillon, who has been helping search for human remains. "You've got a great number of people that you want to find, and you've got a certain amount of dirt that's left. And there's a gap. That gap is going to be a sorrowful one.
"But we can't make more dirt."
But if emotions are intense, and even fragile, no one can risk letting these feelings become too great a distraction, as demolition and recovery crews undertake some of the most dangerous and delicate work they have faced during the entire job.
Firefighters are only now excavating portions of the south tower's lobby and basement floors that amount to a buried morgue containing many of their own, accounting for the raft of recoveries in recent days. Crews working like coal miners at another corner of the site are toiling six stories underground in a dark, wet cavern that was once a PATH rail line, drilling critical supports into bedrock. Other workers scamper across the site's last precariously standing structure while picking it apart with screaming circular saws and robotic jackhammers.
But despite the still chaotic and ceaseless frenzy of the heavy equipment, demolition workers and recovery teams at the site, there is a silent but palpable sense that someday soon they will walk up the ramp and leave the pit forever. And it is that which is strangely disturbing.
"I am a part of something here, something we are all going through together," said Jimmy Horan of Staten Island, a construction worker who has put in 10-hour shifts at the site, often seven days a week, for three months now. "We have all gotten close down here. You almost don't want the job to end."
Fewer Places to Find Bodies
A glance upward from the center of the World Trade Center site reveals an empty blue expanse of sky that is unnerving, simply too vast for a spot in the heart of Lower Manhattan. Not only are almost all traces of the trade center towers now nearly gone, but with the removal of 1.4 million tons of debris in 98,000 truckloads, the work has shifted to the bottom of a pit that is 70 feet below the streets.
But that open blue carapace hangs over a world of still incessant activity. Men in cherry pickers are busily cutting through the last big structural columns left at the site, the sparks from their spitting, crackling torches cascading along the angling crossbeams like water. Trucks heaped with wreckage bellow up the long steel ramp to the street. Barking dogs still sniff for remains.
This jumble of activity must continue until the last of the debris, still probably several hundred thousand tons, is removed. But as the final mounds of wreckage are attacked, the pace has noticeably slowed and the search has become much more meticulous.
A cold fact weighs on the minds of many workers at the site: only 773 of the approximately 2,830 victims of the World Trade Center attack have been recovered and identified, though the remains of many others are still being analyzed. For the firefighters, only 155 of the 343 who died have been found and identified. With only so much debris left to comb, each pile sent off for disposal is one fewer left to look through.
And there is another equally wrenching fact: one of the last spots left to dig out is the base of the south tower, where the firefighters know many people died. That tower was the first to collapse, without warning. Firefighters and other emergency workers had assembled in the wide lobbies on the east and west sides of the building. Some who had evacuated to the lower floors, on their way to safety, may also have been there. Firefighters and their trucks were stationed outside, ready to assist in the rescue effort.
Until two weeks ago, when the steel ramp was installed, recovery workers could not reach this section of the south tower, which could contain parts of 30 or more floors that pancaked and plunged into the basement. Construction crews were using this debris to support a road that carried trucks into and out of the pit. Searchers for remains are working with an intensity unlike any they have displayed until now.
"I just want to get him home," said John T. Vigiano, a retired Fire Department captain and volunteer at the site, who lost two sons ? John, 36, a firefighter, and Joseph, 34, a police detective. Only Joseph's remains have been found. "I am so tired coming down here smelling death, standing on honor guards. What we are looking for are his remains."
One day this past week, 30 firefighters, with picks, hoes, shovels and body bags, watched almost motionlessly as a single yellow grappler, pivoting on its shiny metal treads and reaching with a 40-foot arm, picked gingerly through the muck and wildly twisted steel debris of the south tower. Bit by bit, the grappler dug a trench, slowly moving toward the building's core.
The grappler yanked up one end of a wrecked girder; but as the grappler's big, three-fingered claw pulled, relaxed and pulled again, the other end of the girder refused to be tugged free. The grappler came to a stop, the steel girder now sticking up at a wild angle. The firefighters moved in, stepping carefully into the trench, directly in the shadow of the steel.
"You look for anything that resembles human," one firefighter said, with understandable awkwardness. "Anybody, anything. Could be clothes, could be bone, a shoe."
A tight cluster of firefighters is a sign of another find. The small shovels come out. And then a dark body bag appears. Two firefighters heft the bag up to a waiting stretcher. A firefighter who has been waiting with a folded flag unrolls it and covers the bag, carefully tucking in the ends of the flag so that it does not hang over the stretcher.
Again and again, this sequence has been repeated in recent days. But with each recovery, the pile shrinks slightly.
Torch-cutters are slicing through some of the last structural steel remaining on what had been the southern face of the south tower. A backhoe drives over and pulls on the top of a three-column section, 35 feet high. It seems reluctant to fall, staggering and thumping forward on its severed base for several seconds before tipping over and striking the mucky base of the pit with a tremendous thud.
Precarious Underground World
As dark and disturbing as those scenes are, no place at ground zero is more alien than the subterranean universe where laborers are now drilling deep holes in the earth beneath Vesey Street, in the buried northern fringe of the pit.
Like the search for remains, the work to shore up a 70-foot-high retaining wall that encompasses the site is nearing its final stages. To the south, the east and the west, rows of long cables have been threaded through the wall, called the bathtub, and deep into the bedrock below to keep it from caving inward and letting groundwater, fed by the Hudson River, seep through.
But on the northern edge of the site, the job has turned out to be much more complex. The wall is held up mainly by a series of precarious and partly smashed basement floors and a towering mound of steel debris. The debris cannot be removed until the wall is supported. But the wall cannot be directly reached with the debris there. So the workers have been sent underground.
The only way into that dim world is along the PATH rail line that once ran along the very bottom of the pit, through the basement of the Custom House, which was partly smashed by debris that fell when the north tower collapsed.
A sentry at the ragged mouth of the tunnel checks that everyone who enters is wearing a respirator, goggles, a hard hat and a reflecting vest, and explains that if the opening collapses, there are two escape routes. "Three blasts of the horn, that means get out," says Mike Sturdevant, the contractor at the entry checkpoint whose makeshift desk sits on the crumbling, abandoned PATH platform.
Sunlight soon disappears on the journey down, replaced by harsh bluish spotlights that illuminate the cavern, although many workers have flashlights mounted on their helmets, just in case. A riot of heavy equipment rumbles, whines, beeps and shrieks. Four-foot fans blow incessantly. "This is dead air here," says Peter Rinaldi, an engineer with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site.
What time of day it is, what the weather is like outside, even what day of the week it is ? it is all hard to track for the men working through the unvarying day and night to drill the support cables, called tiebacks, through the streaked, eroded wall of the bathtub, through the sodden soil beneath Vesey Street and into the Manhattan schist bedrock.
Without notice, water backs up from one of the 12,000-pound drilling machines and a plastic pipe swings wildly, spewing mud, sand and water into the air. Elsewhere, water streams in from incomplete tieback holes, fresh evidence of why the bathtub wall is so critical.
The men working down here, in most cases, have been at the job for months, first working above ground installing tiebacks and now here on the once busy PATH tracks. It is an exhausting assignment, one that at many times has seemed as if it would go on forever.
"I don't like it down here one bit," said Matt Lenio, of Northport, on Long Island, whose earlier career was mostly spent driving marine pilings. "Who knows what is going to happen?"
But here too, at last, there is an end in sight. By tomorrow, the last of the tiebacks needed at this basement level should be installed. Already workers from Nicholson Construction Company, which is installing the tiebacks, can sense they are nearing the job's end. But like the firefighters working at the other end of the pit, they so far have shown no hints that their dedication is waning.
"We know where the end is now," said Paul D. Martin, the project engineer from Nicholson. "We see it coming."
And to many, that is the oddly discomfiting part. The last load of debris will probably not be carried away until late May or early June. But already, the army of workers is shrinking as they are detailed to new, more routine tasks. Police Officer Michael Lopez, working a checkpoint at West and Liberty Streets, said: "It won't be easy to walk away. It will be inside you forever, always."
Darrell Sampson, a construction worker who has worked 12-hour shifts for more than 90 days now, said, "I just have a feeling like I belong here, I need to be here."
Kenneth Holden, commissioner of the city agency overseeing the job, the Department of Design and Construction, said, "I've got to force people to take days off."
Battalion Chief James Campbell said that the recent finds have kindled new hope, but added that "there will be sadness, no doubt; you wish you could find more."
The Rev. John W. Moody, who led the honor guard escorting the remains of most of the 11 firefighters recovered on Tuesday, worries that some firefighters are not ready for the day when the wake that somehow lasted six months will finally come to an end. "When they can no longer rescue the remains of their brothers, the whole impact of this event is going to have to be dealt with anew," he said. "It is going to be extra tough on the Fire Department when they go back to their station houses and the guys are really gone."
Hi Phil,
the futures suggest where the market will open, but in most cases, not where it will close.
Agreed. let's try it your way and see how things go. And thanks for being willing to take this on.
Don't hold your breath waiting for one.
That was nice of you, alexed.
And Happy Saint Paddy's Day to all here who are Irish, or want to be.
Thames is English.
Hence his name.
Perhaps you could discuss from the heart and mind here a bit more and cut down on the shooting from the hip.
Thank you for posting that, Koikaze.
I hope we can continue to discuss the tough topics fairly and respectfully
Why is that, BoP?
PM if you prefer.
An accurate, not to mention timely, quote. Thanks, clam-man.
Thank you alexed.
ola,
I am a woman.
WRT the following:
I AM feeling a little sheepish about the conversation with Poet today. I went back and re-read the thread. I can see that his tearing down my extensive post and mis-reading each piece in just enough of an alteration to slant the conversation in his favor is what really ticked me off.
Show me where I twisted your words.
Show me where (until the post I'm responding to now) you responded to the statements and questions raised in my posts to you.
You lost your temper and began to personally attack me precisely because I addressed every point in your posts directly, IMO.
If you actually do feel sheepish, I'll be counting on an apology, a change of behavior, or both.
With prices the way they are, if you owned two condos, you'd be wealthy.
A gazillionaire who owns half the coast of our lovely home state is my bet.
You're probably right.
You know what crossed my mind when I typed that sentence? I added forty years to my age (perennially 29, of course) and realized that I'm very likely not going to be around in forty years.
Gulp.
Congratulations, Joe. A nice win.
No, I don't have the chutzpah to learn from you, I'm sorry.
Hi CM,
Yes, I just heard the verdict. I hope she gets the medication she needs and I guess we'll see her in forty years.
Okay, I'll accept the loss.
Enjoy the rest of the day.
If you believe that asking people to post without attacking each other is equal to being a wimp, then that's what I am.
It is possible to discuss controversial topics without resorting to personal attack. I asked a controversial question and have speaking to a number of people -- who hold opinions with which I disagree -- in a respectful way.
Your posts became filled with personal attacks this afternoon. I reminded you of my thread rule and gave examples from your posts of the kind of thing I consider an ad hominem attack. I warned you, then began to delete posts which contained personal attacks.
If you see this as running away, so be it.
And I have no interest in running with dogs, large or small. It's thoughtful people I'm interested in here.
This is your last warning. From here on in I'll start pulling posts if you can't talk without flinging mud.
I'm a little disappointed, ola. I welcomed you over on the God thread and invited you here. I think you've got some interesting views, but the personal attacks divert attention from the subject at hand.
as a clinical psychologist
you should realize what really was going on in her mind.
You misunderstand the job of a clinical psychologist.
BTW, I am not one now, though I trained.
Excuses are the realm of clinical psychologists
perhaps. But I prefer excuses to rant and invective.
You enjoy the plaudits of idiots?
I enjoy a rational and honest conversation with many kinds of people and made it a habit here on IHub to seek out people with views I do not share.
My only rule here is no ad hominem attacks. Please respect that.
Please read my last post to you.
Oooookay. I just read your responses to my posts to you and I'm going to clarify my rules for posting here:
I welcome posts on any topic, religious, political, and otherwise.
I will defend posters' rights to express their opinion on the topic at hand, however, I will tolerate ad hominem attacks here, on me or any other poster.
Here are examples of ad hominem attacks in your posts:
Lots of knee jerk, bleeding heart stuff in there...poets are not known for there realist attributes or attitudes.
Your sympathies seem noble but in effect, they are a hindrance to civilization.
Please find a way to express yourself without putting down the morality or intelligence of other posters.
Hi ola,
Just so you know, my answer on the nature of Yates' command hallucinations was based on my training as a clinical psychologist, not on religion.
I understand that you're an atheist and believe that much ill has come out of organized religion, particularly Christianity, but my post was about what we know about the nature of command hallucinations.
Hi CM,
I may just be particularly slow today, but I'm not sure I understand your post. Are you saying Yates' children gave her life?
Sorry.....