It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn’t know – and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything. – Joyce Cary, English author (1888-1957)

 Alongside all our knowing must be the equal and honest “knowing that I do not know.” – Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest (b. 1943)

The rising power of the United States in world affairs, and particularly of the American President, requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism, as noisy but also as accurate as artillery fire. – James Reston, U.S. journalist (1909-1995)

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The “mainstream media” gets plenty of blame for shielding the public, to the extent that it can, from the ugly truth that the official accounts of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are full of impossibilities, inconsistencies and scores of outright lies. A couple of distinctions need to be made, however.

First, in the weeks and months after that horrific crime of the century, much invaluable reporting was done and relayed to the public in newspapers and on TV and radio. Independent researchers have used this as well as their own digging to nail down the falsity of the Executive Branch narrative.

Secondly, plenty of reporters would love to be unleashed to continue to track down the truth for the public that depends on a free press in a democracy. Apparently, owners and managers and the advertisers and “underwriters” on which those businesses survive won’t stand for it.

Below is a small example, taken from a book to be reviewed in this blog — three paragraphs of a report in a February 2002 issue of the New York Times by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, under the headline “A Search for Clues in Towers Collapse: Engineers Volunteer to Examine Steel Debris Taken to Shipyards”:

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“From the moment the two towers collapsed on Sept. 11, engineers and other experts have been struggling to answer the monumental questions of exactly why and how the buildings, designed to sustain a jet impact, completely collapsed. But despite promises of a broad federal investigation, and after weeks and calls from victims’ families and others to halt the destruction of the steel that could hold all sorts of clues, the half-heroic, half-comic scenes at the Jersey City scrapyard continue to play out.

“Small teams of engineers plan slightly mad dashes, like mountain goats, into mounds of steel to claim pieces of tower columns. The engineers time their forays to avoid being crushed … Through it all, [they] profess optimism that they are catching and saving what is most useful. But they concede that there is no way of saying for sure; an unknown number of steel columns has been sent off to mills as far away as Asia without ever having been examined or saved.

“‘What they’re doing is extremely noble, ambitious and wonderful and I’m glad somebody is doing that,’ said Dr. James G. Quintiere, a professor in fire protection engineering at the University of Maryland. But, he added, ‘the steel, to me, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that it’s gone.'”

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— Mark Channing Miller

The following is a guest editorial by Mark Crispin Miller, no blood relation to Mark Channing Miller of this blog. He puts out a daily email service called News From Underground, to which anyone may subscribe for free. The message below is the latest dispatch, received at 6:37 tonight Eastern Standard time. It may seem unrelated to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, their causes and consequences, the main topic of this blog, but it isn’t. — MCM

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U.S. Cops Kill Citizens at Over 70 Times the Rate of Other First-World Nations

[That rate is] from five years ago. What is the rate today?

This week the Boston Red Sox dismissed Alex Cora as manager less than two years after he led the team to its most recent World Series championship. The reason: the Sox may have won the pennant and World Series in 2018 assisted by the same illegal sign stealing the Houston Astros used in 2017 to neutralize opposing pitchers on the Astros’ way to their World Series triumph.

On Monday Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred identified Cora as organizer of the scheme in 2017 as the Astros’ bench coach. An investigation found that the Astros, as the Associated Press worded it, “used electronics to steal signs during the franchise’s run to the 2017 World Series title and again in the 2018 season.” The Astros’ manager and general manager were first suspended for a season and then fired by the team’s owner. (The New York Mets’ current manager has also been implicated in the Astros’ cheating from his time in Houston.)

So … coaches and players of one or more Major League clubs misused technology repeatedly to defeat their rivals. Within two and a half years the Baseball Commission was on the case, cracked it, and heads rolled.

Compare this with America’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that murdered nearly 3,000 civilians on U.S. soil and were used to start a series of wars that continue today: The 9/11 Commission, appointed and staffed by the White House, ignored compelling evidence, much of it tracked down by news reporters and published or broadcast years ago — evidence which in a sane world would have buried the phony official 9/11 narrative and averted those wars, evidence which news organizations now have virtually disowned.

Those same organizations participate in the continuing 9/11 coverup by refusing to report on a unanimous U.S. Senate resolution voted fifteen months ago that the Justice Department and the FBI declassify all sequestered 9/11 documents.

I do not mean to say, that the scenes of the revolution are now or ever will be entirely forgotten; but that like anything else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time … At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participant in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son or a brother, a living history was to be found in every family … but those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but, what invading foemen could never do, the silent artillery of time has done; the leveling of its walls. — Abraham Lincoln, 1838 (emphasis his)

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. — John Stewart Mill (1806-1873)

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At the beginning of his 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility, the commentator George Will devotes page ix to the top quote above. It is from an address the future President Lincoln, then an Illinois state legislator and a Whig, delivered in Springfield.

As befits a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and TV personality (Washington Post, MSNBC and NBC), Will eschews anything that might be construed as an overt challenge to the impossible Executive Branch narrative about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that killed an estimated 3,000 on American soil and go on killing today. But he is likely uneasy about having to toe the line.

However, the words of the 28-year-old Lincoln, speaking 55 years after the War of Independence ended, contain a hint or two, whether or not Will meant this, as to why so many Americans are oblivious to the truth that the official narrative about the September 11th attacks is nonsense. “The silent artillery of time” keeps beating away at facts, choking them with dust.

Many who were shocked by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, are dead or past caring. Most of today’s teenagers were yet to be born. To many of their parents, older brothers and sisters and cousins the false accounts are engraved in history and, if anything, reinforced by academia and the news media even as wars touched off by 9/11 continue. The perpetrators counted on this, figuring that even if the phony 9/11 story disintegrated owing to its ridiculousness, they could somehow contain the damage to it by further feats of mass mind control through the media.

To me, “the silent artillery of time” recalls the title of James Reston’s 1966 The Artillery of the Press: Its Influence on American Foreign Policy. “My theme,” he says on page vii of the valuable book, “is that the rising power of the United States in world affairs, and particularly of the American President, requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism, as noisy but also as accurate as artillery fire.”

Tonight six of the remaining candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination will be on stage in a “debate” hosted by the CNN and the Des Moines Register newspaper. As always, the mainstream media hosts, tightly scripted, will be in charge, this time led by CNN’s aptly named Wolf Blitzer. Whatever independence journalists may have had is no longer. Over the years it has been silenced on orders from their organizations’ owners, advertisers, and funders. That silencing accounts in large part for whatever credence the Executive Branch’s preposterous 9/11 narrative may still enjoy.

George Will is no fan of either President Bush, judging by what I’ve read so far in The Conservative Sensibility. One indication is his quote from the French revolutionary Robespierre (1758-1794) on page 437: “The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries.”

But is Will naive, or being disingenuous? Has he not considered that perhaps the idea isn’t to win over these foreign people, but rather to keep the wars going?

— Mark Channing Miller

Today, Jan. 6, is the day of Epiphany, starting a Christian season that ends right after Mardi Gras in Lent. An email message last week said the word epiphany is from the Greek epiphanein for “reveal.” A modern definition of epiphany has it as “an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure.”

More important to those who challenge the Executive Branch lies that make up the official narratives of “9/11,” today marks the birth in 1912 of Jacques Ellul, the French philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian and “Christian anarchist.” Ellul, who died in 1994, is best known for his works on propaganda but is virtually unknown in the United States. (His Wikipedia entry is HERE.)

His works show why and how the scores of epiphanies laying bare the falsehood of official lies, easily available online, are no match for news media organizations acting in concert to stifle them.

— Mark Channing Miller

“Once upon a time there was a little boy; a nice little boy, whom you would have liked if you had known him—at least so his mother says. He had been brought up in the traditions of the old South, to which the two most important things in the world were good cooking and good manners. He obeyed his mother and father, and ate his peas with a fork, and never buttered the whole slice of his bread. On Sunday mornings he carefully shined his shoes and brushed his clothes at the window, and got into a pair of tight kid gloves and under a tight little brown derby hat, and walked with his parents to a church on Fifth Avenue. On week-days he studied hard and obeyed his teachers, and in every field of thought and activity he believed what was told him by those in authority. He learned the catechism and thought it was the direct word of God. When he fell sick and the doctor came, he put himself in the doctor’s hands with a sense of perfect trust and content; the doctor knew what to do, and would do it, and the little boy would get well.”

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The paragraph above begins Chapter One of Part One of a book written just over a century ago by a writer who may have met Mark Twain. He certainly seems to have read Mark Twain. So far, this is all I’ve read of the book. I’ll explain another day what the book has to do with 9/11 truth and how many copies of it exist in central and western Massachusetts public libraries and provide its title and subtitle.

The title is not “Those Were the Days.” Click HERE for a link to a song with that title.

— Mark Channing Miller

Does organized religion have blood on its hands for not publicly questioning the official story of 9/11 as year after year of revelations have laid bare the impossibility — the absurdity — of what the U.S. government’s Executive Branch and the captive news media continue to uphold as the truth?

Perhaps the answer is yes. It turns out that on this day the topic is fitting for an execution that took place on Dec. 29, 1170. The paragraphs that follow are from The Calendar of Saints (Forward Movement Publications, 2004).

— Mark Channing Miller

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Champion of the Church’s Honor

“There is no more celebrated English saint than Thomas Becket who was treacherously murdered in his own cathedral during Christmastide. The four knights who chopped him down were unwittingly dispatched to do so by King Henry II who had grown weary of years of conflict with Becket over the relationship between the Church and the Crown.

“Henry and Thomas had been comrades and the King had nominated him for Archbishop of Canterbury in part because he thought he could influence him. That had not turned out to be the case. When he took the Chair of St. Augustine, Becket turned from the convivial life of a courtier to the austere life of an ascetic and became a champion of the poor and of the rights of the Church. Henry II sought to control and use the Church for the Crown’s political and economic aims.

“He never intended to have Becket killed, but after years of altercation he exclaimed, ‘Who will rid me of this pesky priest?’ Four of his knights set out to oblige the King and a few days later they fell upon the Archbishop in his cathedral at Canterbury and hacked him to death.

“Thomas Becket’s death signaled a victory for his cause since it resulted in the rallying of enormous public pressure against the King. The slain archbishop became a symbol of the integrity and independence of the church from an oppressive government. The sainted archbishop was laid to rest in Canterbury Cathedral and the site of his death became a shrine. For many generations it was the most popular place of pilgrimage in the British Isles.”

Christmas morning was made perfect by the playing of the two-disc “Ultimate Sinatra.” Starring himself, it cut through 40 years of music making and the generations of all Millers present. A few days earlier Old Blue Eyes as “Pal Joey”* had flashed them and a big smile at a family member who decided to take him and the album home from the store.

If I have it right, for some of the 24 songs** Frank Sinatra is accompanied by a studio orchestra. One is pictured with him inside, all 27 members of it, in a large full-color photo. For one song Harry James and his orchestra back up the singer in 1939. In another Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra and the Pied Pipers do the honors in 1940.

Four words from side 4 furnished the title above. They open “The Theme from New York, New York,”*** Why shouldn’t Start spreading the news work for the job ahead in 2020, a year for focus and clarity?

— Mark Channing Miller

p.s. HERE is another take on Sinatra, written by Edward Curtain for the new year, added by me on the evening of Jan. 3 when I came across it.

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* Movie also co-starring Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak that came out in 1957.

** “All or Nothing at All,” “I’ll Never Smile Again,” “Saturday Night,” “Nancy,” “I’ve Got the World on a String,” “Young at Heart,” “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “Learnin’ the Blues,” “Love and Marriage,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Witchcraft,” “All the Way,” “Come Fly With Me,” “One for My Baby,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “My Kind of Town,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” “It Was a Very Good Year,” “Strangers in the Night,” “Summer Wind,” “That’s Life,” “My Way,” “Theme from New York, New York,” and “Put Your Dreams Away.”

*** Written for the movie “New York, New York” that came out in 1977, four years after the opening of the World Trade Center and 24 years before the unexpected destruction of three of its skyscrapers on Sept. 11, 2001, a Tuesday morning on which nearly 3,000 persons were murdered in Manhattan and at the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. Click HERE to hear Sinatra singing a version of the song for a live audience.

Could be, who knows? There’s something due any day / I would know right away, soon as it shows. / It may come cannon balling down through the sky / Gleam in its eye, bright as a rose. — From “West Side Story”

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid. the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. — Isaiah 11:6

The link that attaches individual persons to society is so strong that, even in the so called “individualistic society,” people struggle to exercise the critical thinking needed to resist mass trends, and end up readily consenting to the annihilation of what they cherish most: their freedom. — Bernard Charbonneau *

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What is really going on?

Mainstream media organizations are of little help, steadily putting themselves out of business in terms of credibility. Internet alternatives are a mixed bag; some of the best, though, include skilled reporters doing original investigative work; add to these analysts (some in pajamas), entertainers, stylists, ideologues and combinations of these categories, most sifting through mainstream and alternative sources, and most relying in part on revenue obtained through Donate button appeals.

We at x-ma911truthwalk.com do zero original reporting but try to get at truth and mislead as little as possible. One of us is a retired journalist (mostly newspapers, some wire services), the other a retired engineer and academic (mathematics and computer science).

There are so many interrelated cons going on it’s impossible to keep track of them all.  A friend brought this home during our walk across Massachusetts last year. He insisted The Confidence Man was Melville’s best novel, one he would like to teach.

Hence for me the current liturgical season of Advent, in many churches a few weeks of special anticipation and hope, has been welcome. It signals the coming of the birth of the baby Jesus, while also amplifying the later ministry of the wild John the Baptist, whose voice cried out about the ministry of the adult Jesus, his cousin whose sandals he is unworthy to carry.

Many nominal Christians whose tradition includes Advent avoid thinking about the season at all, much less relating it to today’s world. I’m not one of them, because all the coverups are intolerable.

A old joke: “The wolf and the lamb may lie down together, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.”**

— Mark Channing Miller

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* Thanks to Ted Lewis of the Interntional Jacques Ellul Society, who began a message received yesterday with those words from Charbonneau. Lewis might send the same message to anyone writing him at ellulsociety@gmail.com.

** Thanks to Stephanie Spellers and Julie Hoplamazian. They add, “But when the laughter stops, there’s a painful truth. Left to our own devices, following our own instincts, we can predict where most narratives will run: The powerful will win; the weak will suffer; divisions only grow stronger with time.”

Perhaps most Americans relying on newspapers for their information on Tuesday’s impeachment vote in the House didn’t know who the U.S. representative was who voted “present” on each of the two counts, if they knew such votes were even cast.

Perhaps one of the network TV newscasts mentioned it Wednesday morning, or Tuesday evening. NPR’s “Morning Edition” did.

I emailed a request to the campaign press office of  U.S. rep and Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard to find out what kind of coverage her unique votes got. Her statement (not to be confused with an answer to my email, which has yet to arrive) is HERE.

More later.