My Latest Guilty Pleasure :Seconds from Disaster
Right now, I have three television addictions: Fox's My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss (don't miss the Office Paint Ball game this Sunday!), The Amazing Race (easily the best show on television) and now, National Geographic's :Seconds from Disaster. :Seconds from Disaster lets you:
See how disasters are caused by a sequence of events locked together in time.Blending advanced CGI, archival footage, re-enactments, forensic science, dramatic eyewitness accounts and expert testimony, join us as we deconstruct, moment-by-moment, the chain of events leading to some of the world's most infamous disasters.
One of the latest episodes broke down the the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. Unlike most of the shows, this episode wasn't so much about how the attack happened, but more about why the Pentagon withstood the attack so well and why, compared to the World Trade Center attacks, so few people died. Among those reasons:
- When the Pentagon was built in 1941, planners envisioned the building eventually becoming a file warehouse, so it was built to hold extremely heavy loads
- After the Oklahoma City bombing, parts of the Pentagon had bombproof windows installed
- As part of ongoing remodeling projects, thousands of people had been moved from the impact zone to another part of the building just weeks before 9/11
As I was watching the show, I was thinking about how lucky we were that the terrorists chose to attack the Pentagon rather than the Capitol or White House. There's almost no building better equipped to stand up to an attack than the Pentagon.
But then, I started thinking about how the Michael Moores of the world would watch the show. They'd hear that same information and start concocting theories about how the government must have known or even planned the 9/11 attacks. And, how they chose the Pentagon precisely because so few people would die. I think this was a glimpse into how the paranoid mind of the DU lefties works. There's no room for chance or coincidence or even some kind of blessing from above. There's only room for the evil deeds of Bushhitler, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.
Posted by at December 9, 2004 10:57 AM
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Comments
| # March 7th, 2005 6:48 PM Converted_Comment | |
they say that the target was originally the white house, and that the pentagon was a "Back up target" to be hit in case they missed the white house b/c the white house is "really hard to see from the air." (i dont know who "they" are, but i've read this in a few different places.) that is just plain inaccurate - i've flown into reagan airport a dozen times, and the white house is very easy to see. everything on and off the mall is. perhaps the white house was the original target. if so, the reason they "missed it" surely wasn't b/c they couldn't find it. |
| # March 7th, 2005 6:48 PM Converted_Comment | |
on (another) unrelated note - the national geographic channel is a surprisingly good channel - check out "megastructures" sometime. |
| # March 7th, 2005 6:48 PM Converted_Comment | |
No one helped Bush get re-elected more than michael moore. Any actual shortcomings and ligit points made by him are grouped with the pile of shit of a movie he made. Cant tell the facts from the rest... so its all considered bullshit. I mean... his tour was called "slackers uprising"... can he do anything more to discredit anti-bush america? |
| # March 7th, 2005 6:48 PM Converted_Comment | |
but yeah... seconds form disaster is cool. I never knew about that pilot being pinned outside the plane thing before... i was late to class because i was too interested in it. |







