A full-page ad in the New York Times on Tuesday contained these words spoken by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in March 1965 in Selma, Alabama:

“The only way we can really achieve freedom is to somehow hunker the fear of death. But if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. Deep down in our nonviolent creed is the conviction—-that there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they’re worth dying for. And if a man happens to be 36 years old, as I happen to be, some great truth stands before the door of his life—-some great opportunity to stand for that which is right and that which is just. And he refuses to stand up because he wants to live a little longer, and he’s afraid his home will get bombed, or he’s afraid that he will lose his job, or he’s afraid that he will get shot, or beat down by state troopers. He may go on to live until he’s 80. He’s just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80. And the cessation of breathing in his life is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of spirit. He died.

”A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

”So we’re going to stand up amid horses. We’re going to stand up right here, amid the billy-clubs. We’re going to stand up right here amid police dogs, if they have them. We’re going to stand up amid tear gas!

”We’re going to stand up amid anything they can muster up, letting the  world know that we are determined to be free!”

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I quote the whole passage, which probably is not the whole speech and may well have been extemporaneous. The ad was paid for by Team ROC (see https://www.weareteamroc.com).

The passage is NOT from the better known “How Long? Not Long” speech, which King delivered on March 25, 1965, at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march. The whole of that speech is at https://www.mlkonline.net/our god.html and it is well worth reading carefully.

Among the many parts of it that jump out at the reader is this:

”How long? Not long, because ‘no lie can live forever.’”

— Mark Channing Miller

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and several families of those killed on Sept. 11, 2001, are appealing to the 77 U.S. representatives on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

In an email this week, AE911Truth supporters in the 77 House districts were asked to contact the committee members to support the organization’s “Request for Correction” to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The formal request aims to have NIST reverse its 2008 conclusion that office fires caused the destruction of the World Trade Center’s Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper not reported to have been struck by an airplane on Sept. 11, 2001.

In the request, filed on April 15, and in this week’s call to its supporters, AE911Truth is building on the report by University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers of a four-year computer modeling study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. The researchers found that the 47-story WTC 7 was not brought down by office fires but rather by “the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building,” according to an AE911Truth news release.

“It is now time to bring this new information about the destruction of [Building 7 in the World Trade Center to key U.S. lawmakers and urge them to take action,” AE911Truth said in a news release accompanying the request to supporters.

The purpose of the move, AE911Truth said, is to urge the 77 representatives “to address the claims contained in the document, which represents an unprecedented challenge to NIST’s report on Building 7.”

The news release, HERE, tells supporters how they can easily determine if their U.S. reps are members of either committee and, then, how they can telephone or email their offices. Supporters who follow through are asked to email AE911Truth at a specified address and “let us know what response you receive” because “we want to keep track of which members have been contacted and what their responses were.

“Make your voice heard!” the appeal concludes. “There’s never been a more important moment than now.”

AE911Truth says its formal request to NIST “covers eight separate items of information that … violate the agency’s information quality standards.”

The request says that “only by revising its ‘probable collapse sequence’ can NIST correct these violations.”

NIST attributed the destruction of the nearby Twin Towers, which killed nearly 3,000 persons on Sept. 11, 2001, to their being struck by two airliners, whose jet fuel together with office fires it ignited critically weakened both buildings, causing them to collapse.

NIST is an agency of the Department of Commerce. According to its website, it “promotes U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.”

The four-year UAF study, funded with $316,000 from AE911Truth, was led by J. Leroy Hulsey, Ph.D., professor of civil engineering at UAF’s College of Engineering and Mines (CEM). To read the project report including a three-paragraph summary, click HERE.

Other team members were Feng Xiao, now an associate professor at Nanjing University of Science and Technology, and Zhili Quan, currently a bridge engineer in the South Carolina Department of Transportation.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* The Request for Correction is discussed, HERE, in a conversation titled “What It Means and How NIST Might Respond,” with Ted Walter of AE911Truth, attorney Mick Harrison, and 9/11 Free Fall host Andy Steele.

Someone named Richelle Thompson had this to say today about the power of a narrative:

“Tell me a story, she begs. And I don’t think it’s just because she’s trying to postpone bedtime. At least, that’s not the complete reason. As I weave a story, part fantasy, part recollection, my sweet daughter curls into me.

“Tell me a story, he asks. As the campfire flickers, I frankenstein a ghost story from the horror flicks of my childhood—and my son listens, bewitched by the tale.

“We are hardwired for story. …”

The rest of Ms. Thompson’s commentary is HERE, from the May-July issue of Forward Day by Day.

It is titled “Free Assange.” It is by Caitlin Johnstone.

It doesn’t mention 9/11 but is about 9/11 among many other things.

HERE it is.

Ki never had any kids. She was married a couple of times but as far as anyone knows there was no “issue,” as a lawyer might say, and now it’s unlikely she will. That’s just as well because it would complicate things in her line of work as a detective.

She came up at breakfast this* morning. One of us commented that as likely as not she will get herself tied up in a complex investigation she’s not getting paid for alongside of one she is getting paid for, exposing herself to inconvenience in the process.

It’s none of your business, someone might tell her. Or keep your nose out of this. But Ki is not deterred—in part because she doesn’t have any kids to complicate matters and in part because she was a cop for a few years and is still interested in seeing justice done.

This latter thing is what drives some “truthers.” They get curious about some crime and want to see the perpetrators brought to justice.

Like many truthers she got started before the Internet existed, with traditional gumshoe techniques. Nowadays with a few keystrokes on a computer she can save time and legwork.

Ki usually works alone, often with a little help from cop friends. That’s where she differs from today’s truthers, who are so numerous they get in each other’s way, sometimes deliberately so as to discredit the whole effort.

Happy Mother’s Day anyway, Ki.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* This was written and posted on May 10, 2020, last Sunday, which was Mother’s Day. It disappeared without a trace and is being reposted today, May 14.

For self-quarantining people who have the time . . .

. . . read a 6,000-word report, “Techno-Tyranny: How the U.S. National Security State Is Using Coronavirus to Fulfill an Orwellian Vision,”* by investigative journalist Whitney Webb . . .

. . . see her interviewed about the report by Jimmy Dore of The Jimmy Dore Show . . .

. . . then watch Webb interview author Douglas Valentine** on how the Phoenix program, which the CIA launched in 1965 to “pacify” the South Vietnamese population, served as a model for U.S. operations around the world before and after the September 2001 attacks in the United States . . .

. . . and then view a nine-minute video in which Valentine narrates how former U.S. Special Forces members helped him research his best known book, The Phoenix Program (2016), and his Vietnam War novel, TDY (2000), about U.S. government complicity in international drug trafficking, by supplying technical details of Special Forces and mercenaries’ covert operations around the world.

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* The report’s subtitle: “Last year, a government commission called for the US to adopt an AI-driven mass surveillance system far beyond that used in any other country in order to ensure American hegemony in artificial intelligence. Now, many of the ‘obstacles’ they had cited as preventing its implementation are rapidly being removed under the guise of combating the coronavirus crisis”

** The link includes a transcript of the interview.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

“Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who could do only a little.”**

“It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.”***

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.”

“Never, no, never did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another.”

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* Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

** Reminds one of the famous Margaret Mead quote.

*** But when the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry asks you to do something, humanity, reason and justice are talking as well.

From the trailer of “Seven,” a short documentary* for which Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth is trying to raise $9,000 by Friday to air on PBS:

“There was no excuse for rushing to remove debris from Building 7. There was quick decisions made about taking evidence away…. They only saved one piece of steel, and that piece of steel suffered some extreme temperatures.

“They seemed to focus on a solution right from the beginning and ignore all evidence that would go in another direction. There was just silence in the academic world about this subject, so we began looking around for someone that would be willing to undertake such a study.

“We ran across Professor Hulsey up at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.”

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* The film would be on PBS’s “Spotlight On” series.

In a letter to the editor in the Douglas County (Missouri) Herald, Dr. Kimberly Brady, a physician, asks several dozen new-coronavirus-related questions.

Thanks to Mark Crispin Miller (no relation) of News From Underground for sending it out.

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Thanks also to Consortium News for this hour-long panel discussion on the case of imprisoned Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is awaiting extradition to the United States. Moderator John Rees hosts journalist/filmmaker John Pilger, reporter and Wikileaks partner Stefania Maurizi, and writer and former correspondent Charles Glass.

GOOD MORNING! to students of life, and the communications media, history, and political science.*

There’s no class today, but here is some homework to read on your own and maybe discuss with one another while practicing social distancing.

HERE is an example of the ad hominem and the kind of writing one can do when not restrained by editors and publishers of the controlled media. It’s by the Australian commentator Caitlin Johnstone.

HERE is an example of hyperbole as well as the kind of writing one can do when not restrained by editors and publishers of the controlled news media. It’s by upstate New Yorker and aging upstart James Howard Kunstler,

The Kunstler entry, valid as much of it seems to be, leaves out the possibility that the people running the Democratic Party will be doing that whether “the Democrats” win or lose the presidency or the House or the Senate—they win either way. This includes the hypothesis that the United States has a one-party system with two heads, one called the Democrats and one called the Republicans. Which may be why there are so many “independents,” or unenrolled voters, and nonvoters, and Greens and Libertarians.

Getting back to today’s assignment, Kunstler and Johnstone routinely employ both hyperbole and the ad hominem, and the above entries are no exception.

Anyone might ask what this has to do with 9/11 truth. For extra credit, you can compose an answer and email or text it in.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* “Political Science” is the title of THIS 1972 song by Randy Newman.