Sunny, breezy and maybe a bit chilly this Wednesday evening here on California’s north coast.
Although the feeling today was a bit on the cool side, we did manage to hit 70-degrees in early afternoon, and the next two days are expected to be even warmer.
Indian summer it seems — dog-run to Ma-le’l Dunes about mid-day was overcast, but balmy through the dunes and overcast-nice on the beach.

Today is the 18th anniversary of the Twin Towers. A lot of news stories on the event, a lot of ceremonies written up, and even reports of Republican assholes using the observations as cover for nefarious deeds.
Among the online ink, Esquire posted a couple of really-good descriptive historical accounts, here and here.

I have my own 9/11 story, but it occurred the day before, Monday, Sept. 10, 2001, and is but an idiotic example of way-ironic naivete.

In that seemingly long-ago time, I was then living in San Luis Obispo, down in the Central Coast area of California, probably the overall nicest part of the state. I’ve resided all over, from Orange County down south, the Fresno/Merced hotbed district, to up here, and SLO is the best. Just way too expensive, and has developed into elitist living conclaves, from way-many BMWs to exorbitant rent.
Anyway, on that Monday morning I drove my oldest daughter to work — she was temporarily at home, awaiting a big move to Virginia to join her husband, a sailor stationed at the Norfolk Naval Base — and so didn’t have transportation. She usually took the bus, but when available, I happily gave her a lift. The job was not far away. SLO is not that big.

During the drive, my daughter expressed some anxiety about her husband being in the military. She was concerned about his safety. I reassured her there wasn’t a problem — no worries.
In fact, since her husband wanted to attend college, the Navy will pick up a big part of the tab via the GI Bill. And he’ll be fine, adding with a joking smile, “unless there’s a war.”
I remember those last words distinctly, even after all this time. And the mocking tone.

Of course, the next day…

Happily, her husband made it through his enlistment with all the horrible shit that followed the Twin Towers. Sadly their marriage didn’t, they divorced five years later.

And the ‘horrible shit’ should be remembered along with 9/11 — Paul Campos at Lawyers,Guns&Money this afternoon nailed it per Condi Rice’s appearance on Stephen Colbert Monday night:

Condi Rice continues to be a darling of high society because even most liberals have no interest in revisiting the Iraq “mistake.”
(Calling premeditated war crimes “mistakes” is of course a strategy for denying their actual nature).
The lasting significance of the 9/11 terror attacks is that they served as a phony pretext for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
That needs to be remembered and memorialized at least as often as the attacks themselves.
An important part of that remembrance is to call things by their proper names, and for people to treat war criminals as war criminals, not as honored celebrities.

Speaking of which and our current piece-of-shit-in-chief the T-Rump, the last couple of graphs in a Washington Post story also this afternoon says it all on the T-Rump and everyone not the T-Rump:

People who have known the president over the years stress that, for Trump, everyone is eventually expendable.
“When you use people like Kleenex, eventually the Kleenex is filled with snot, and you throw it out,” said “Art of the Deal” co-author Schwartz.
“That’s the way Trump treats everyone.”

Mourn liberty…

(Illustration above by illustrator and portrait painter, Tim O’Brien, and can be found here).