“Words of wisdom about words used by scammers” is the headline over Elliot Greenblott’s Fraud Watch column today in the Berkshire Eagle. The caption under an accompanying photo reads as follows.

”The author says that the reality is that there are two kinds of people: those who have been scammed and those who will be. Educated people are scammed every day. Scams have no relationship to education or the lack thereof. Scams use emotional ploys to build anxiety, and remove the logic and reason developed through education.”

How about this. There are at least three kinds of people: those who have been scammed, those who will be, and those who will be again and again and again. In this last category are most of the exquisitely propagandized American public, especially the more highly educated members of polite society well attuned to the opinion makers in government and (I know this is redundant) the news media. The O.M.A.—opinion makers of America—can make vast majorities of Americans believe just about everything for as long as it takes, including official accounts of important assassinations,* the “War on Drugs,” and the 9/11 attacks of September 2001. In the latter case the official accounts were so farcical that it took a dollop of anthrax scare (generated from the bowels of a government lab) beginning later that month to distract everyone from the ridiculousness of the Arabs-with-box cutters story.

Often it’s the less educated people who are less prone to swallow what’s handed down by O.M.A. operatives.

Two-thirds of the way through our walk across Massachusetts, Bruce and I had coffee with a fellow who had worked as an investigator in a couple of capacities including in jobs that had something to do with how buildings are made and not made. This retiree, I’ll call him Joe, insisted his favorite Herman Melville novel was The Confidence Man, which takes place mostly on Mississippi River steamboats. Joe said he’d love to teach a course based on it because of how much is revealed about the fraud that has gone on since before Greenblott’s grandfather was born. Including the fraud that led to our 9/11 truth walk and that conversation. He’d have his students start halfway through, read to the end, and then read from the beginning to the middle.

We come across attempted scams every day and usually recognize them. “A primal urge,” Greenblott notes, is often greed. Sometimes it’s fear, as in “emotional ploys to build anxiety.”

— Mark Channing Miller

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* The less important ones we don’t hear about.

. . . Bites the Dust

Obituaries of Pete Hamill today provided echoes of the good writing the Irish-American enfant terrible, champion of the underdog, and darling of the New York glitterati who died this week at 85.

Robert D. McFadden’s in the New York Times contained this by Hamill, about his first stepping into the New York Post’s city room, which was, he wrote, “an organized chaos of editors shouting from desks, copy boys dashing through doors into the composing room, men and women typing at big manual typewriters, telephones ringing, the wire service tickers clattering, everyone smoking and putting butts out on the floor.”

He was hooked

Hamill may have been hooked before that day in 1960–perhaps while in the Navy—because as Edward Curtin pointed out, HERE, like his pal Jimmy Breslin, another legendary storyteller in the tabloids, Hamill wasn’t into challenging official narratives.

Another paragraph from McFadden’s obit:

”His presence at crises was uncanny. In 1968 he was steps away from his friend Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles on the night Kennedy was assassinated and helped subdue the killer, Sirhan B. Sirhan. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was blocks away when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, killing thousands, then described it in the Daily News.”

Note that in the obituary Sirhan is “the killer.” Whereas Sirhan was at best a patsy, certainly not alone. Ballistics evidence established that from where the Jordanian citizen (occupation: stable boy) was in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom the bullet that mortally wounded RFK could not have come from his gun.

Note that although Hamill lived nearly 19 years after the WTC attacks he was not moved to chronicle the absurdity of the official line as it has unraveled during that time. It’s not colorful enough, and apparently that’s not the function of newspapers anyway.

— Mark Channing Miller

THE COMMAND WAS EMPHATIC. She heard and understood it loud and clear. The year was 1141.

“Write what you see and hear.”

According to Mirabai Starr, the voice identified itself as “the Living Light.”

It said, “Oh mortal, who receives these things not in the turbulence of deception but in the purity of simplicity for making plain the things that are hidden, write what you see and hear.”

These voices and visions had been messing around with her head for years since Hildegard of Bingen was a sickly girl. But in that year she took them to heart and went on the road.

Starr, in her own way, is doing so: “We are not all prophets,” she writes. “It may not be our job to challenge authority and expose corruption. We may not be the ones to penetrate the code of sacred scriptures and feed the spiritually hungry. It may be up to others to sound the clarion call of impending doom, calling on humanity to change its ways. 

“Ours may be a modest awakening,” Starr says. “We may simply refuse to participate for another moment in a life against which our hearts have been crying out for years.”

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Okay, that’s “religious.” It’s from the Center for Action and Contemplation, a Franciscan outfit based in New Mexico. And Starr is, it says here, a “spiritual teacher.” So let’s get back to the real world.

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The real world includes the top editorial in today’s Springfield Republican, headed, slightly ungrammatically, ”Can citizenry overcome the ‘infodemic?’”

Readers are treated to nine paragraphs of warnings against “conspiracy theories, misinformation, and downright falsehoods perpetuated by social media.”

The writer resorts to ad hominem rhetoric and half-truths. Trusts the Pew Research Center (a self-described “non-partisan fact tank”). Lampoons the recommendation of a Houston physician who advocates hydroxychloroquine as part of a cure for Covid-19. Assures readers that the remedy “was debunked by doctors after Trump made claims of its usefulness … weeks ago.”

In other words, stay away from any physician thinking there’s a use for hydroxychloroquine, ever, to save a patient from death or severe illness? Take it from the Republican, a solidly mainstream organ that takes comfort in a Pew poll that only “one in five get their political news primarily through social media.”

“Twitter and other social media platforms must live up to their pledge to remove ridiculous theories,” the Republican counsels. “As the virus continues to spread, we can only hope that the actions of reasonable people will win out over conspiracy-minded believers.”

I.e., physicians, even apart from the pilloried Dr. Immanuel of Houston, who see a legitimate use for hydroxychloroquine against Covid-19 are unreasonable—and perhaps should lose their licenses? Are they all conspiracy-minded (CIA-speak for unhinged)? Is there any merit to these physicians’ willing to endanger their careers and reputations by differing with the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control? Who are these loonies anyway, and how many are out there anyway?

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This just in. A CNN report today from Brazil corroborates the Republican’s view that hydroxychloroquine is for the birds when used to fight Covid-19. It’s “a distraction … it just does not work” the correspondent assures, citing “study after study.”

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Also today …

Is former Vice President Joe Biden up to functioning ably as president or even lasting through a successful campaign into November as the Democrats’ standard bearer? James Howard Kunstler has his doubts. But take his opinions with a grain of salt. He is, after all, a mere maven of the blogosphere and hence not a trustworthy or reliable. Proceed with caution HERE.

WARNING: From three days ago, here’s a view on hydroxychloroquine by Paul Craig Roberts that is incompatible with today’s Republican editorial on the “infodemic” of misinformation on the coronavirus front. Readers who are overcome by cognitive dissonance should sit down and have a tall glass of water. Then continue reading.

And today’s blog entry by Caitlin Johnstone coaches her readers, as she has in the past, in some ways to get their “dissident ideas heard in the new media environment.” After all, she reasons, the mainstream media “have betrayed humanity to an unforgivable extent.” What to do?

“You know,” she asks, “all that space mass media reporters take up in society’s awareness proclaiming what’s true and what’s going on in the world? That’s your space. They usurped it. Take it back from them. … We must move into that space, and use our collective voices to cripple the establishment propaganda machine.”

This is diametrically opposed, in tone and content, to the Springfield Republican’s editorial today, which provides a good reason to take her advice.

— Mark Channing Miller 

The 9/11 resolution of the commissioners of the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District in Nassau County, New York, came out a year ago tomorrow—on July 24, 2019. Someone who lives in that district is observing that anniversary by reading the resolution, HERE.

Visitors who would like to read it yourselves, probably not for the first time, may do so HERE.

Thanks to Susan and Richard of Boston 9/11 Truth for passing along word of this anniversary reading. (I hadn’t looked at your site for awhile. It was good to see some of your faces just now!)

Thanks also as always to everyone at the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry and Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth for your great work.

So far, as far as anyone knows for sure, the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York has not empaneled a Grand Jury to examine plentiful evidence of unprosecuted federal crimes committed at the World Trade Center related to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001–evidence disproving the official story of the attacks and the three buildings’ destruction.

— Mark Channing Miller

You cannot fudge this kind of science. We have found it. Unreacted thermite. … Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have long known that the three [World Trade Center] buildings were demolished. This has been crystal clear. Our research is just the last nail in the coffin. — Niels Harrit in a 2009 interview on Danish television

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Niels Harrit is a name I don’t remember hearing or seeing before Bruce Henry and I met for brunch in downtown Pittsfield four or five years ago. Bruce had brought along a paper containing Harrit’s reasons for concluding that nano-thermite was used to destroy three World Trade Center buildings on Sept. 11, 2001. Bruce lent me his copy, which was in a pale orange-colored folder. Some days or weeks later, after I finally got around to reading it, my interest in pursuing alternatives to the official story of the “9/11” attacks was revived.

Harrit, now 75, was an associate professor in the Chemistry Department of the University of Copenhagen for 37 years.

Harrit and eight other researchers with whom he wrote the paper concluded that impacts from two jetliners did not cause the collapses of WTC Buildings 1, 2 and 7. Rather, they thought, explosives including nano-thermite, traces of which were found in the rubble, were placed in the three buildings in advance and ignited in a precise sequence.

I thought of Harrit recently when someone emailed a link to a video of a 2012 interview of him by Lilou Maté of Lilou’s Juicy Living. HERE it is.

HERE (scroll down a bit) is a more conventional* interview of Harrit on a Danish TV news program, conducted not long after the paper coauthored by him was published in 2009.

There is nothing new above in this entry, which merely serves as a reminder of some scientists’ efforts begun in the early years of this century. Readers who already know about the project of Harrit and company might send a link of this to someone who doesn’t.

What was new to me until yesterday is a Purdue University project, summarized briefly in a National Geographic video HERE and in other online presentations that support official accounts. (I may add another link or two to it, but they should not be hard to find.)

In the National Geographic video, Mete Sozen, a professor of civil engineering at Purdue, describes the project briefly. Sozen died in 2018 at age 87. His obituary, HERE, does not mention the Purdue study in describing his career.

I trust Harrit and company over Sozen and company. I trust the University of Alaska/Fairbanks study led by Professor Leroy Hulsey. Read and hear about it HERE and HERE among lots of other places but not in National Geographic.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* This interview would be anything but conventional on U.S. network news, where challenges to the official story of the attacks and destruction Sept. 11, 2001, have been verboten since not long after that date.

Two views of the dismal state of affairs this country is in are HERE and HERE. One is more realistic and hence less palatable than the other and shall be read online if at all. One is more acceptable to mainstream media advertisers and thus will be read by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people by Tuesday.

The first is by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist George Will. I read it this morning in our local daily, the Berkshire Eagle, which used “This is what national decline looks like” (the column’s concluding sentence) as its headline. Will is familiar to many as a participant in various TV shows of news and commentary.

The second, which I just read online, is by twice-weekly blogger, novelist and nonfiction writer James Howard Kunstler. It is headed “A Bigger Picture.” I don’t expect ever to see Kunstler on TV apart from a “community access” station.

Will, for this column’s purposes, finds it convenient to blame just about everything on Donald Trump. Kunstler sees the current mess the United States is in as a long time in the building; he wrote last week that his “current position” was that he “would vote for [Trump] this time to keep the Democratic Party out of power.”

— Mark Channing Miller

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reality is bad for business. What’s good for business is the fantasy. — Richard Heinberg

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A top story on page 1 in yesterday’s New York Times, headed “Frackers Fail, But Executives Reap Millions: Taxpayers Could Bear High Cleanup Costs,”* by Hiroko Tabuchi, conerns the failure of fracking operations around the country.

It’s beautifully done, a must-read article. The reason that some energy companies are “hurtling toward bankruptcy at a pace not seen in years” is “a global price war and a pandemic that has slashed demand.” In the same fourth paragraph “a potential environmental disaster” is noted: “unprofitable wells that will be abandoned or left untended, even as they continue leaking planet-warming pollutants ….”

For me, the story recalled the newspaper’s consistent shutout of a host of researchers and writers, some of them from the inside petroleum industry, who predicted this years ago, coronavirus pandemic or no coronavirus pandemic. My impression is that they were uniformly non-existent in the pages of Times, their books unreviewed and their views barely acknowledged—the same treatment the newspaper accords to 9/11 “truthers.”

See THIS quick response by Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute to a 2014 column, titled “Errors and Emissions,” by a Nobel Prize-winning Times columnist, headed “Paul Krugman’s Errors and Omissions,” which links to Krugman’s column. To my knowledge, Heinberg’s name has never appeared in the Times, a distinction he shares with other prescient authorities on energy matters.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* The link is to the article as carried in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

But as for Polyneices, who perished so miserably, an order has gone out throughout the city—that’s what people say. He’s to have no funeral, or lament, but to be left unburied and unwept, a sweet treasure for the birds to look at, for them to feed on to their hearts content. That’s what people say the noble Creon has announced to you and me—I mean to me—and now he’s coming to proclaim the fact, to state it clearly to those who have not heard. For Creon this matter’s really serious. Anyone who acts against it will be stoned to death before the city. — From Antigone

Who’s running this place, anyway? — Unattributed

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A phrase popped out at me from an Associated Press story in Friday’s papers: “the grand jury process is confidential.”

The context in this case was THIS article headlined “Justices: Grand jury can seek president’s tax filings.” The first paragraph: “Rejecting President Donald Trump’s complaints that he’s being harassed, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in favor of a New York prosecutor’s demands for the billionaire president’s tax records.”

Characteristically, President Trump reacted furiously.

In this case the grand jury is in Manhattan, where the state district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., called the decision “a tremendous victory for our nation’s system of justice and its founding principle that no one—not even a president—is above the law.”

Contrast this with a matter involving a federal district attorney in Manhattan, now-former United States Attorney Geoffrey Berman, whom President Trump fired last month.

Why Trump fired Berman is a mystery. Possibly it had nothing to do with his apparent stonewalling on a petition by the  Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry that he present to a federal grand jury “evidence of explosives and incendiaries involved in the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers” on Sept. 11, 2001. Possibly it had to do with his having presented that evidence. This is unknown, because the same confidentiality the AP noted of the grand jury process at the state level also pertains to federal grand juries.

In any case, Berman’s former deputy U.S. Attorney, Audrey Strauss, is currently Acting U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, and now the matter is in her hands.

Berman had informed the Lawyers’ Committee that it and its clients lacked “standing” in its petition and in a Mandamus appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Lawyers’ Committee also lacks standing with the editors of the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal, which have never acknowledged its existence.

[ MORE ]

As he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” — Luke 19:41-42

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(A couple of glitches in this entry were corrected on 7-12-20.)

As previewed, HERE, CNN’s senior White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, and Berkshire Eagle executive editor Kevin Moran, met virtually last night in an online chat. Today’s Eagle reported that the event’s host, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, estimated that it netted more than 900 viewers, presumably including people like me who listened by phone.

Many more can view the whole Zoom conversation, titled “The Enemy of the People: One Impeachment, and One Pandemic Later,” via the local OLLI’s Facebook page, HERE. (Click “Videos” and then select the leftmost square in the top row.)

At the beginning, Acosta and Moran were introduced by Lisa Sharkey, senior vice president at HarperCollins, which published his 2019 book, Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America, and is publishing the new paperback version with an afterword on President Trump’s impeachment in the House of Representatives.

Eagle subscribers may read the newspaper’s coverage of the event HERE. On page 1 today it is headed “Acosta talks Trump, virus, journalism.”

–   –   –

Notes, 7-11-20

* See Wednesday’s New York Times HERE and HERE for prominent and massive attention given to Mary Trump’s Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, news and analysis beginning over the fold on page 1 and a page and a half inside. Repetitive but highly readable for this certain best-seller-to-be published by Simon & Schuster.

* Much less prominent but still helpful , the AP story “Pete Buttigieg has a new book set for fall release,” in the Berkshire Eagle’s “People” roundup on Thursday.

The former South Bend, Ind., mayor and former 2020 Democratic hopeful: had this to say in a statement on the book, Trust: America’s Best Chance, to be published by W.W. Norton/Liveright:

“In order for our country to move forward in the years ahead, it will be more important than ever to build trust—trust in our institutions and leaders, trust in each other, and trust around the world in America itself. Now is the time to consider the foundational role trust plays in our democracy, and what it will take to build the trust we’ll need to recover and to advance as a country.”

In short, don’t question authority. Trust is sure to be another best-seller as was Buttegieg’s 2019 Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future, and will be I Have Something to Tell You, by his husband, Chaten Buttegieg, when published by Simon & Schuster in late summer.

* Try this out:

”This is our country, right or wrong. When America goes wrong, we do wrong, not the government, nor uncontrollable forces, but we the people. It is dangerous to think that because our personal intentions are right, we are therefore not involved.”

This quote is taken out of context. It is part of Shannon MacVen-Brown’s reflection, HERE, on the passage up top from Luke. The bishop of Vermont’s Diocese of the Episcopal Church, she is talking about her fellow Christians and their roles in the world.

What I often think about is how “the things that make for peace” are hidden from our eyes.

— Mark Channing Miller

HERE’s some overdue credit given to the working stiffs of some of the mainstream media.

An Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth news release is headed “New Analysis of 9/11 Footage Finds the Dominant Hypothesis Among Reporters Was that Explosions Brought Down the Twin Towers.”

The analysis is in a long paper by Ted Walter of AE911Truth and Graeme MacQueen, author and co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies. It includes portions of videos of numerous reports by correspondents, each portion accompanied by a transcript.

(On some computers—including the one used to write entries of this blog—Walter and MacQueen’s paper does not appear owing to technical problems. On other computers including certain cellphones the paper and its audio/video components may show up fine, at least for a time. I had monitored a dozen or so of the news clips in the paper’s appendix when a message appeared saying “A problem repeatedly occurred on ‘https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/technical-articles/articles-by-ae911truth/696-how-36-reporters-brought-us-the-twin-towers-explosive-demolition’.”

The paper is titled “How 36 Reporters Brought Us the Twin Towers’ Explosive Demolition on 9/11.” Click on the title to access it and see how successful you are and for how long.

A follow-up paper by the two researchers will “[examine] how the hypothesis of fire-induced collapse so quickly supplanted the originally dominant explosion hypothesis,” according to the news release.