Steve Inskeep and Edward Curtin won’t sit down and shut up.

Inskeep because he is a mainstream media star best known as a co-host of NPR’s Morning Edition program (and keeps getting asked to propound on other platforms). Curtin because he is a non-mainstream writer and thinker who is good and annoyed about general acceptance of mainstream views (he doesn’t get invited anywhere except to non-mainstream websites). 

Each has just had out something new, Inskeep’s courtesy of Monday’s New York Times and Curtin’s courtesy of his own website and Global Research.*

Inskeep hammered another nail into the coffin of the Trump administration via his guest column headed (in the newsprint version) “Trump’s One-Term Legacy.” He contends that the obscurity of presidencies limited to four years or less will outweigh the Trump administration’s acts and antics. Good mainstreamer that he is, he disregards legal efforts challenging key states’ election results.

In his essay, Curtin contends the Trump-Biden matchup (he voted for neither) was opéra bouffe for the masses, exemplies “the real matrix,” and was designed to further cement into place control by the people who run things regardless. It is titled “The Past Lives On: The Elite Strategy to Divide and Conquer.”

Read both pieces.** Compare and contrast. See which expands your awareness more. (An unfair contest: Inskeep was limited to 700 words and a single idea; Curtin goes on longer and has touched on most of the same elements before.)

Each has a book to push. Curtin’s, published this fall, is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies: Critical and Lyrical Essays. Inskeep’s is Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War. There are plenty of reviews of each online.

— Mark Channing Miller

*  Also available on Disident Voice and other sites. The advantage of reading it on Behind the Curtain is that commenters usually have worthwhile things to say.

**  Access to Inskeep’s column may be restricted to Times subscribers or those who have not exceeded their free monthly quota of articles.

If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth. — Julian Assange

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What with the coronavirus pandemic and the U.S. elections, among other distractions, it has been easy not to remember for days at a time that Julian Assange is still in a British prison. HERE is a reminder.

Apparently there has been nothing new from WikiLeaks since it released the Fishrot Files Parts 1 and 2, both in November 2019. Take a look HERE.

Sometime soon I’ll look at the Al Jazeera documentary “Anatomy of a Bribe” about them, HERE, and then see what is to be found about the whole thing elsewhere.

— Mark Channing Miller

The eyes are like a lamp for the body; therefore if your eyes are OK, your whole body will enjoy the light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be plunged into darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is obscured, what deep shadows you will find yourself in! — Matthew 6:22-23

The world is full of great criminals with enormous power, and they are in a death struggle with each other. It is a huge gang battle, using well-meaning lawyers and policemen and clergymen as their front, controlling papers, means of communication, and enrolling everybody in their armies. — Ernesto Cardenal in a 1959 letter to Thomas Merton

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It was fun to read George Will’s column in yesterday’s Springfield Republican, which headlined it “Where the GOP and the Framers disagree.” * For one thing, it’s always fun to get out my pocket-size copy of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to look things up. Makes me feel like a regular citizen.

It was on the Census. But as a truther, the first half of column’s first sentence piqued my interest right away: “This nation’s empirical and inquisitive Founders considered information conducive to improvement… .” *

Information. Where do we get it in these here United States? Traditionally (even before the nation existed), from newspapers, which in the Framers’ time included political pamphlets representing various perspectives. In the hinterlands they came on horseback (think the pony express and its predecessors), horse-drawn stagecoach, covered and uncovered wagons, and later trains. In cities, they could be delivered on foot directly from whatever printer (like Ben Franklin) with a point of view or servicing someone else with one—no horses or trains required.

Literate colonists, citizens, citizens-to-be read them, critically, and passed them around, within families and beyond. Then they discussed and argued over the news, opinion and analysis—on town greens, in taverns, at work.

Information. There’s plenty of it even today, including misinfo, slanted info, disinfo, gaslighting, and who knows what else. It’s all there, it’s all here. In the Internet age, anyone with a keyboard who wants to pipe up can do so including this typist, Yr. Hmbl. Svt. We bloggers abound. List-servers do, including some like the News From Underground crew. Emailers, Tweeters and Facebook and YouTube correspondents are so numerous that they are considered time sucks. Junk mail on screens, including TV screens. Not to mention radio, including “public” radio. A glut. A mess—like this paragraph.

Americans, though (and this probably pertains to people in other countries), are less equipped than they (we) used to be to handle their responsibilities as would-be participants in a democracy or as responsible participants in a livable world. 

One may legitimately ask whether they’re (we’re) intended to be any more. Or whether they (we) ever were, any more than the slaves or “Indians” of the Framers’ time.

Americans are not supposed to think. An American should not be alone with her or his thoughts, not even in a car. “Please connect your mobile device,” a voice may instruct when one turns on the ignition. (For now, it’s still OK to decline. Some cars don’t even ask.)

Rather, good Americans let anointed scribblers and pundits do their thinking for them—preferably ones commanding audiences across print, TV, and radio, which leads to these anointeds’ authorship of best-selling—and prize-winning—books heavily promoted across print, TV, and radio. Booksellers depend on them. They sell.

Good Americans are sports fans from birth, cultivated as such through print, TV, and radio. Many declare their allegiance to professisonal teams by flying team flags outside their houses, wearing team-theme articles of clothing, and affixing team decals on cars and trucks. Will will occasionally devote a column to some esoterica of professional sports to nail down his credibility as a real American. (Just as—Americanly—he engages in Sunday morning TV food fights.)

(Good Americans might consider some of the above to be propounded by a Russian asset, one who is knowingly or unknowingly so.) Yikes! What is to be done? (Didn’t Lenin say that?)

Jesus is supposed to have said nearly two thousand years ago what Matthew says he said in the quote up top.**  (I read mention of it in another opinion column in the same newspaper last week and looked it up.) The passage fittingly describes the press (a.k.a. media) in a body politic. If the press (a.k.a. media) is healthy, that’s great for a society. If it’s not, the whole society is plunged into darkness and will find itself in deep shadows, whether its members know it or not. 

In Matthew, this passage comes Just before before Jesus saying you can’t serve God and mammon (or money), “for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other.”

The society where Jesus was a renegade inhabitant was no high-tech alleged democracy with mostly literate people such as we Americans are; it was a theocracy whose leaders collaborated with heathen occupiers from across the Mediterranean. Most people got around on foot, had or were slaves, and were informed by “media” that was word of mouth. (All food was organic and locally grown.)

“Where are you going with this?” one might ask. Here’s where: Those people were less likely to be fooled or distracted or entertained or amused than people in “our democracy,” as our system is sometimes called. “Our democracy” is media-led, with the other three branches of government subservient at all levels. All four branches of “our democracy” are paid for by and answerable to … mammon.

For that matter, today’s system might be called a theocracy of mammon, which pays for the sports, arts and entertainment and Sunday-morning food fights. Today’s heathens are people paying more than token attention to the remnants of the traditional Abrahamic religions.

“A republic, if you can keep it,” Ben Franklin is supposed to have replied one fine day in Philadelphia to a woman who asked, out on the sidewalk, what kind of government he and the others had cooked up. (As Will points out, this government was not for the slaves or “Indians.” Come to think of it, Will is a framer, being paid to help frame American discourse.)

Ernesto Cardenal, in the other passage up top, was writing more than sixty years ago to Thomas Merton (one priest to another, both at least somewhat on the outs with their own Church). He gives the press and other communications media their due as instruments of great criminals. Less than a decade later Merton, unwilling to contain his views, died under suspicious circumstances at age 53.

What does this have to do with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001? Everything.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* The link is to the same column as it appeared online in the Journal-Star of Lincoln, Nebraska, under the headline “George Will: Founders, GOP Diverge.”

**There is a version in Luke.

It was 1:23 by the kitchen stove clock this afternoon when I realized today was Nov. 22 and therefore an anniversary of President Kennedy’s murder in Dallas.

The Warren Commission, chaired by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, officially concluded that an ex-Marine loner named Lee Harvey Oswald committed the murder unassisted, shooting from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Repository as President John Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy rode in an open convertible in a welcoming parade. Oswald claimed he was set up (he used the word “patsy”) and had not done it, but was himself shot dead while in police custody by an apparently distrught local restaurateur named Jack Ruby.

In the 57 years since the assassination, persons who have refused to swallow the official narrative but rather conclude it was a state murder and that the state involved was the United States, have been termed “conspiracy theorists” in the news media, and perhaps by friends, acquaintances and family. But as fewer and fewer people accept the narrative (as fewer and fewer people know there even was a President Kennedy, much less that he was assassinated by a sniper’s bullet), the news media are probably less and less likely to label dissenting citizens (who are increasingly in majorities) conspiracy theorists.

It helps that by now tens of thousands have read James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Simon & Schuster, 2008). And that Douglass had to have been inspired and instructed by Michael C. Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (New Society Publishers, 2004).

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It was about 4:10 this afternoon by the tiny clock on this computer when, after typing out the above paragraphs, I realized I hadn’t checked Ed Curtin’s blog, Behind the Curtain. Sure enough, he had turned out THIS, titled “Unspeakable Memories: The Day John Kennedy Died.” He links to “The Day John Kennedy Died,” a song written and sung by Lou Reed, which is accompanied by wonderful photos.

Now I’ll take a  break from this to finish reading that entry and, today or tomorrow, return and finish this.

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— Mark Channing Miller

‘The Beginning Is Nigh . . .’ / with Hancock and Corbett

Readers are encouraged to set aside an hour or so for this conversation between two Internet mavens who seem to know what they’re talking about. Listeners may gain an inkling or two about how increasing numbers of people will go about informing themselves in the future on the Internet. (Most listeners are guaranteed not to understand all of what these two say. But they may find the talk intriguing.)

James Corbett, a Canadian who lives in Japan, turns out The Corbett Report, an online program of “open source intelligence news.” He and it are further described HERE. Ernest “Ernie” Hancock, an Arizona-based libertarian activist, publishes Freedom’s Phoenix materials and hosts the Declare Your Independence Internet show, HERE.  

Recorded last Friday, this is Corbett’s most recent appearance on DYI. Topics include: saying good-bye to an increasingly censored YouTube (owned by Google); saying hello to fediverse.party, a federation of Internet servers; and an alleged “coronavirus lockdown” in Greece that requires (or required) residents to text authorities before leaving home. Also, “i9/11,” a possible false-flag technological attack of some kind, and a subsequent “iPATRIOT ACT.”

Neither Hancock nor this James Corbett (there have been others) is acknowledged by Wikipedia, and Corbett’s name has yet to surface in the New York Times. Hancock appeared in a 2002 Times story in his capacity as a husband and a litigious Arizona resident.

Again, these two appear to know the subjects they’re talking about. Many listeners won’t. (Listeners between the ages of 12 and 35 may know more than their elders.)

— Mark Channing Miller

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* Headline inspired by the poem “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” by Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)

I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too? / Then there’s a pair of us! / Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody! / How public – like a Frog – / To tell one’s name – the livelong June – / To an admiring Bog!

The way you get democracy to function is by informing the public. — Robert Kennedy

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By now millions of people will have read Thomas L. Friedman’s column from the New York Times headlined “Only truth can save our democracy.” (That was the headline also in this morning’s Berkshire Eagle, the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the Salt Lake Tribune, where it may be read online HERE, and elsewhere. A blogger used “The Trump presidency and the normalization of lying.”

“On Saturday morning,” Friedman begins, “I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife, Ann, who was stirring her Cream of Wheat, when out of nowhere she surprised me with a question: ‘Is not lying one of the Ten Commandments?’”

The trouble is, the column could seem to imply that lying in government and politics began with Republicans and Donald Trump’s first campaign for the presidency, which included signing on to the pre-existing “birther” baloney that Barack Obama was born outside the United States.

Anyway, lying includes lies of omission. Everyone at the Times including their many Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners knows that the government/news media narratives about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are false. As are a host of other government/new media narratives defended by the Times when it has looked the other way.

My hunch is Friedman wrote the column not just for the multitudes, but for higher-ups at the Times and at news organs elsewhere who keep reporters away from forbidden topics. 

The column ends, “We need to restore the stigma to lying and liars before it is too late. We need to hunt for truth, fight for truth and mercilessly discredit the forces of disinformation. It is the freedom battle of our generation.”

— Mark Channing Miller

It’s another sunny day in the Berkshires. Are any of the items in this entry related to 9/11 TRUTH? Yes. All of them.

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Holy Madness, Batman! — Richard Rohr is on a roll (he usually is), His meditation for today, titled “Love is Our Deepest Identity,” is HERE. 

The mass murder of Sept. 11, 2001 (one really sunny day on the East Coast), was always about getting a string of wars going by instilling fear in the U.S. populace. Particularly pertinent in this regard is this part of Rohr’s message:

When we live out of this truth of love, instead of the lie and human emotion of fear, we will at last begin to live. Love is always letting go of a fear. In the world of modern psychologizing, we have become very proficient at justifying our fears and avoiding simple love. The world will always teach us fear. Jesus will always command us to love. And when we seek the spiritual good of another, we at last forget our fears and ourselves.

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For Fairness in Georgia — Independent investigative reporter Greg Palast has championed electoral fairness in a number of places. (He’s got this thing about the misuse of power.) Right now for reasons he states HERE, it’s the state of Georgia. Peachy! Truth is contagious. I’m thinking he hopes to motivate non-Georgians to help Stacy Abrams’ cause there. (It’s about fairness.)

Palast has been on the case of former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach for awhile. See THIS VIDEO (and assorted links) for his take on how Kobach has been spreading what sure seems to be unfairness across the land when it comes to voting. WARNING: It does not reflect well on the Republican Party.

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Count All the Votes — Vice President Mike Pence says all the votes need to be counted carefully, especially in suspicious voting districts where the number of Republican ballots have been deemed insufficient. Fair enough. Trump apologist James Howard Kunstler (he used to be a peak oiler and may still be *) seconds the vice president’s motion HERE in a post called “Fore !” (He questions the nation’s news media and the “intelligence community” for good reason. Imagine.)

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Conspiracy Theorist Confesses to Shoplifting — He apologizes for it HERE. (He puts his own crimes in context.) WARNING: This man has been down the rabbit hole so many times he has lost his ability to believe everything he reads in the New York Times.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* I still am.

It’s still sunny in these parts of the United States of Anxiety in the land of Fear. (Or at least the time of Fear.) (Will the Associated Press and the rest of the media next determine that Fear (fear) shall be upper case from now on, and if only partially so, in when shall it be up and when down?

Sometime this year of Fear (or fear), Black went up but white stayed down. (This was much to the chagrin of Dennis Prager, who wrote about it HERE in The Epoch Times. I agree with Prager, and agreed with him before reading the column headlined “Why Are They Capitalizing ‘Black’?” I had not heard of him before then.)

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One reason this has been the century of fear is that the powers that be—the ones who pulled off the mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States (which led to mass murder and mayhem elsewhere, which helped the cause of arms manufacturers and “good union jobs” where some employees are unionized)—want it to be.

The 9/11 attacks blamed entirely on Muslim extremists were followed quickly by the anthrax-letters terror beginning days later. Barbara Honegger, Mick Harrison and David Meiswinkle (brilliant, each one of them) give an update on their (and others’) research HERE (scroll down for their presentation eight Fridays ago). (It bears re-watching; there really should be a transcript of the 55-minute update and perhaps will be soon.)

The three speak in their own separate capacities rather than for the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, of which they are board members.

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Two days later, seven Sundays ago, Honegger, Harrison, Meiswinkle and others pulled together a discussion about three times as long, which can be found HERE. (It also deserves its own transcript.)

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And now Covid.

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— Mark Channing Miller

It’s Ray Day in the United States of Anxiety. Or Rays Day.

It is, at least, in the small corner populated by the few people who occasionally read this blog. For the third straight day the sun’s brilliant rays pour down upon Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the penultimate town on the walk Bruce Henry and I took across the commonwealth from Provincetown in 2018 wearing phosphorescent “9/11 TRUTH” signs fore and aft. (Bruce doesn’t read this blog unless prompted to by me — although he came up with its website address name, https://www.x-ma911truthwalk.com.)

Readers are hereby* invited to take a few minutes away from post-election uncertainties and continuing Covid-19 uncertainties (and economic uncertainties and Earth-warming uncertainties) to consider some Rays.

Briefly, and in order of their mental appearance this morning:

*  James Earl Ray, the small-time criminal framed for the government assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The framing was successful until the work of the valiant Atty. William F. Pepper got him posthumously exonerated by a Memphis jury in 1999. Ray was finally exonerated even in the pages of The Washington Post. (See Pepper’s book The Plot to Kill King [Skyhorse Publishing, 2016.]) (The New York Times still clings to the hoary lie that Ray did the deed rather than just serve as an elaborately set-up patsy. And the rest of the media stays mum.)

*  David Ray Griffin,** author of at least 10 books laying to waste establishment accounts of the 9/11 false-flag mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001, any one of which books will reward readers not previously acquainted with Griffin.

*  Ray Bradbury, whose short story “Rocket Man” inspired Elton John to write and perform his “Rocket Man” (Listen to it HERE or HERE) in 1972. (Books by Bradbury, best known for the novel Fahrenheit 451, are available in most libraries.) (Pepper’s and Griffin’s are not, but can be borrowed though interlibrary loan.)

*  Ray Girard, a slightly senior (to me) and slightly wild (especially compared to me) colleague at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette the two summers I worked there. We shared an apartment in Marlborough the first summer, when I met Phil Ochs (1940 – 1976) through the grooves of his then-new 1966 album “Phil Ochs in Concert” owned by Ray.

*  Ray Lamont, a sports reporter for the Berkshire Eagle in the 1970s (when I first knew him) who ended his career several newspapers later as top editor of the Beverly Times; he retired there shortly before his death this year. Jovial, loving, thoughtful and frequently stammering, after work Ray would sometimes lead everyone (or many) present at Del Gallo’s in a few stanzas of what he said was the Soviet Union’s national anthem (“Dong DONG dong da dong dong, dong dong da dong dong …” — no one knew the words***) before or after we had sung a verse of the Marseilles (everyone knew some of the words).

*  Ray (for Remo) Del Gallo, second-generation proprietor of Del Gallo’s Restaurant, a former Pittsfield mayor, and soft-spoken counselor to many.

— Mark Channing Miller

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*  President Trump said yesterday he “hereby” declared victory in Michigan, to which NPR’s Mara Liasson reminded listeners that “it doesn’t work that way.”

** Pathetically, Wikipedia opens its biography of Griffin with “an American 9/11 conspiracy theorist^[2] and retired professor of philosophy of religion and theology.”

*** Sticklers will say what we actually sang was “Dulng DULNG dulng da dulng dulng, dulng dulng da dulng dulng ….” But maybe it wasn’t in fact the Soviet Union’s national anthem. Music and lyrics to that are HERE.

Mark Crispin Miller sat down with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently for a fascinating conversation about, among other things, mandates on the wearing of face masks and how and why they came about. Click HERE to listen and watch. It’s an hour long but well worth the time.

There should be a transcript. Among the related topics touched on are the left, diminished democracy, propaganda, and censorship (including “shadow banning”).

Miller and I are not related. He is a tenured professor in New York University’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication and is currently taking heat for asking his students to do their own research into the wearing of face masks.

Miller runs a free service called News From Underground. Click on that link for more about it and him.

— Mark Channing Miller