A good number of us 9/11 truthers tend to be truthers when it comes to official Executive Branch narratives about the JFK, MLKJr., and RFK assassinations. Many are also skeptics when it comes to government / mainstream news media narratives on the subject of what is variously called the novel coronavirus, Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, and, “the Covid.”*

Late this week James Howard Kunstler** sent out the second of his twice-a-week blog posts, which as usual blasts President Biden up and down. The first of several items below is about a link at the very end of the post.

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‘Big Fail’: The essay before that link is standard, readable Kunstler. For many, the rip-roaring news begins afterwords, separated by a centered asterisk. There begins a fascinating interview with the non-physician Dr. David E. Martin. I regard this as a must-listen conversation. So filled is it with authoritative-sounding assertions worth examining that I have urged Kunstler to get a transcript out so people can read it instead of or while listening to the audio. Readers clicking on “here” in this squib (the one  you now are reading on  a screen) will get just “Big Fail” and need to scroll down and click that “here” for themselves, perhaps after reading Kunstler’s twice-a-week post. Two pieces of common sense apply while listening: Consider the source. And, as Martin advises, follow the money.

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Daniel Ellsberg & Company: An annual event is announced, belatedly, HERE by Andrew Kreig of the Justice Integrity Project, under the headline “Whistleblower Summit This Week Highlights 50 Years of the Pentagon Papers and Investigative Journalism.” The 10-day “summit,” accessible only online because of Covid restrictions, begins tomorrow (Sunday, July 25) and includes more than 50 documentary film screenings, a number of panel discussions,  and … well, you read it. Kreig’s news release includes a link to “ticket information for the sessions, which may be accessed individually (some for free) or with a full-conference pass for $150.”

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The Sermon on the Mount: One fine day Jesus got baptized by his cousin John, according to accounts in the Gospels. Not long after, he started (or ramped up) his own ministry. A week’s worth of commentaries on the best-known and most influential encapsulization of Jesus’ teachings is found HERE, courtesy of Richard Rohr and friends at and around the Center for Action and Contemplation. Today’s is found after a scroll through the links of the first six. The Sermon on the Mount is not exactly news, but some of these views about it may be.

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Tired of All the Lies?: Edward Curtin begins his latest essay, HERE, facing east on the Cape Cod National Seashore noting that 60 years ago next month President Kennedy signed a bill to preserve the considerable stretch of the Cape for posterity. HERE’s how the National Park Service describes that park. Curtin invokes Thoreau and his contemporary Matthew Arnold in the captivating post. Author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies, a 2019 collection from his Behind the Curtain, he doesn’t doesn’t stay on the beach for long.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* Take my non-kissing non-cousin, Mark Crispin Miller (no relation) of News From Underground, perhaps the foremost extender of news and opinion on the “other side” of the dominant issue of our day.

** Kunstler is no 9/11 truther, though. For all his bravura on other topics, he has yet to venture a peep that I know of on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or the followup anthrax attacks. Why not?

A further brief addendum to Update, 7-21-19 and News, 7-19-21, this one from same friend:

* . . . this certs petition will be very telling. The decision will probably be delayed as it will be very difficult to avoid taking the case without SCOTUS losing credibility. All the justices know that the story is just so simplistic and childish and they are on the spot and you can bet that the CIA and others will be all over them. . . . What a country we have become

This is a bit of an addendum to the other day’s entry, News, 7-19-21.

* Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth sent THIS today.  Headlined “AE911Truth and co-plaintiffs appeal FBI lawsuit to US Supreme Court,” it’s another version of my possibly-mangled account.

* And a friend supplied this comment: “SCOTUS [the Supreme Court of the United States] has dodged 9/11 suits in the past by claiming that it’s a national security issue . It takes 4 justices to honor the Certs request.”

— Mark Channing Miller

LC Files Petition to U.S. Supreme Court: The Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry has filed a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the failure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to comply with “the mandate from Congress to assess all evidence in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,” according to a Committee news release.

The National September 11 Memorial Memorial & Museum has been a memorial of the 2001 terrorist attacks since 2011 and a museum since 2014, both at the site of the former Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

The New York Times, headquartered not many city blocks to the north, is a newspaper world famous for its authority and quality, and noted for its influence on the rest of the news media in the United States and abroad.

Yesterday the Times led its Arts section with a feature article geared to museum-world realities. Budgetary nightmares will prevent the non-profit from offering special exhibitions and other 20th-anniversary programming there. About 60 percent of the institution’s staff has been laid off or furloughed, in part because of lost income from months of Covid 19 restrictions.

Headline: “9/11 Museum Vexed by Cuts and Feuds.” Subhead: “New exhibitions are dropped, and critics say the institution seems frozen in time.” Byline: By Zachary Small.

For many who have challenged government and news accounts of “9/11,” the story may be tough going for the first dozen paragraphs. They include, without attribution, this standard summary of the attacks:

“[T]he terrorist group Al Qaeda hijacked several planes and used them as weapons. Two crashed into the World Trade Center towers and a third flew into the Pentagon. A fourth plane was headed toward Washington, but passengers and crew members fought back, bringing it down in a field in Pennsylvania.”

No attribution has ever been needed for the various Pulitzer or Nobel prize winners who tuck such a passage into their articles, let alone a relatively unknown writer for the Times Arts section. If he didn’t put the summary in, the copy desk would have.

Then, though, Small’s story picks up. Weaved into details of attendance figures, budget deficits, government loans, fund-raising efforts and architectural descriptions is some telling information.

The founding creative director, Michael Shulan, is among those interviewed who say the museum balked at having 20th-anniversary programming that would challenge the official government 9/11 story.

Shulan: “Twenty years marks a turning point where one begins to look at things with a certain amount of hindsight. Not asking questions just leads to further crises.”

Memorial & Museum chief executive and president Alice M. Greenwald carries out a thankless job of defending the government 9/11 line.

Some new information may be revealed in “The Outsider,” a documentary film by Pamela Yoder and Steven Rosenbloom, to be released online next month, based in part on extensive footage from years of private meetings at the museum. Rosenbloom speaks of the museum authorities’ “decision … to codify, control and limit,” at the cost of a more accurate picture of the attacks and related matters.

Many researchers see the mainstream news media as places where 9/11 truth goes to die. The Times’s report this week may presage something different.

— Mark Channing Miller

(An article in the New York Times begins to shed the kind of light on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that a growing number of researchers have been looking for in the mainstream news media.

(Headed “9/11 Museum Vexed by Cuts and Feuds,” the story under Zachary Small’s byline leads the Arts section of the newsprint editions of today’s Times.

(Because since a few months after the attacks — at most — Times reporters and editors seemed to have been prevented from delving into a number of aspects of the “9/11” phenomenon, it’s an article of historic importance. Some who have followed the subject, mostly online, may want to purchase a copy of today’s Times at a newsstand.

(More to come. — MCM)

. . . or, If You Prefer, a Must-Listen Interview

This blog has recommended at least several chats Andy Steele has conducted with guests in the 9/11 truth effort.

The one linked HERE, though, may be the best.

Personally, I didn’t listen to this one. Rather, I read the transcript of the half-hour sit-down, and frequently re-read some of the parts.

Steele speaks with Mick Harrison of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry and Ted Walter of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, who are at their best, as is Steele himself (at least the three of them are in print). People who have followed this for years will be rewarded for their attention.

But even beginners to the whole wretched 9/11 saga of Executive Branch coverup shouldn’t find the conversation daunting to understand.

I could quote at length from the brief against the National Institute for Standards and Technology regarding its report about how Building 7 at the World Trade Center came down into its own footprint in the late afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. But that could spoil the best parts for readers and listeners.

Harrison, litigation director of the Lawyers’ Committee, and Walter, author of Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of Towers 1, 2, and 7 of the World Trade Center, are at odds with what they see as NIST’s spurious and dissembling denial of a Request for Correction of its 2008 report on Building 7’s collapse.

In federal court (more details in late August), Harrison’s legal team will challenge NIST’s denial of the RFC as replete with deliberate falsifications and illegal evasions under the Data Quality Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.

Any lawyer or law student should find the interview compelling, but any adult American concerned about the country’s future should as well.

— Mark Channng Miller

Pogo* said it years ago: We have met the enemy and he is us. A lyricist for the Broadway musical “Li’l Abner”** may also have been right: Progress is the root of all evil, progress is the cause of it all.

There was tremendous “progress” for “us” in the interstate highway system (see HERE and HERE) that led to the rape of the countryside for suburbia and the gutting of cities throughout the land in favor of asphalt-surrounded malls nearby. Cars and trucks were the way to go; with petroleum used up “we” need to be always on the move electrically. Don’t think — drive.

(The above suggestions originate in comic strips of newspapers of yore. The Berkshire Eagle op-ed page for today, July 6, launched some of what follows.)

Columnist Carole Owens writes (“Mohican dispossession a dark spot in local history”) of the swindling from a band of the Mohican nation of their land in southern Berkshire County and nearby by politically astute — and rapacious — whites. These native Americans had abandoned it and vamoosed entirely by the early 1800s, westward eventually to Wisconsin. A Christian missionary named John Sargeant, a pair of Woodbridge brothers, and, later, the Puritanist theologian Jonathan Edwards come out rather well in this story.

(Readers of this blog from outside Eagle territory are respectfully urged to contact any of the newspaper’s subscribers they know to see this excellent summary, which deals with a mere dot on the whites’ march across the continent; properly importuned, perhaps some of those subscribers will somehow share its contents.

(Owens makes use of a wonderful piece by Lion G. Miles (1934-2020) in the New England Quarterly titled “The Red Man Dispossessed: The Williams Family and the Alienation of Indian Land in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1736-1818.” To be able to read it via a free subscription, you may have to find it in on a search engine and follow directions, entering the name of your local library as “institution” and then describing an interest, like “history.” You will be handsomely rewarded.)

Lower on the same op-ed page is Errol Morris’s look at a key Washington insider’s machinations, blandly headed in the Eagle “Donald Rumsfeld’s fog of memos.” Also published in the New York Times, it may be found HERE.

Morris begins, “Trying to understand another human being is often a dismal task.” His sketch of one of the system’s consummate political manipulators, who died last month at 91, is some of the fruit of his following Rumsfeld for years, directing the documentary “The Known Unknown” about him, and writing a series of articles about the neocon who was twice secretary of defense.

The op-ed concludes with this paragraph: “[Author] George Packer recently called Mr. Rumsfeld America’s worst secretary of defense. But this isn’t a popularity contest. It’s not the man, so much as the methodology. And the methodology, alas, seems ubiquitous. It’s not just him. It’s all of us.”

“Methodology.” It’s how Ephraim and Elijah Williams and their ilk, with help from a distant legislature, could dispossess Mohicans of any land and send them packing. It’s how “neoconservatives,” with help from just about everyone including — and this is essential — the news and entertainment media — can wage Cold War and later “the war on terrorism” to keep ruinous imperial games going.

Rumsfeld, his turn-of-the-21st-century “deputy” defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and fellow co-signers of the Project for a New American Century manifesto including Dick Cheney were only the obvious conductors of a system they mastered. They have used entities throughout the world including the United Nations and a controlled international press the way the Williamses & Co. used the General Court in Boston to have their way more than two centuries before.

So don’t go pointing fingers. Just get in your car and drive.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* A comic strip possum created for posterity by Walt Kelly.

** Also the name of Al Capp’s daily comic strip featuring Li’l Abner himself and his wife Daisy Mae, mostly in Dogpatch.

America the Beautiful

O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain,
for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed his grace on thee,
and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.

O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,
who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life! America! America! God mend thine every flaw,
confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.

O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years
thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears!
America! America! God shed his grace on thee,
and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.

Words: Katherine Lee Bates (1859-1929), alt.
Music: Materna. Samuel Augustus Ward (1848-1903)

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Note: Please see the two announcements in yesterday’s entry, headed “News, 7-3-21.” — MCM

AE911Truth to Sue NIST in ‘Major Lawsuit’: Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth announced today it will sue the National Institute for Standards and Technology for “flagrant violation” of the Data Quality Act in connection with NIST’s failing to properly address the group’s Request for Correction of the agency’s conclusion that fire caused the destruction of Building 7 at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. The announcement, HERE, has links to NIST’s denial, issued last Wednesday, and a preliminary analysis of it by AE911Truth lawyer Mick G. Harrison, dated yesterday.

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Commemorative 9/11 Event Scheduled for NYC: An all-afternoon and -evening event marking the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be held at the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City on Saturday, Sept. 11. It is sponsored by the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry in collaboration with two other national groups — the 9/11 Truth Action Project and Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. An initial invitation is HERE.