If you wish to discern either the presence or absence of integrity, you need ask only one question. What is missing? Has anything been left out?* — M. Scott Peck
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Bruce** and I had breakfast together yesterday. It was a reminder that this blog had its start a few weeks before our walk across Massachusetts in April and May 2018 with “9/11 TRUTH” signs on our chests and backpacks, to encouragingly positive response by motorists, fellow pedestrians and others. There have been about 400 postings since then. The meal was at The Soda Chef, a retro luncheonette on Pittsfield’s North Street, the same place we ate at just before taking the first of three buses that got us to Hyannis, where a friend picked us up; she got us to our talk at the Provincetown library, then fed and put us up for the night, got us breakfasted and saw us off walking toward Truro.
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Last night “The Insider” was playing at our house. It’s the 1999 docudrama starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino about whistleblowing executive Jeffrey Wigard (Crowe) and TV producer Lowell Bergman (Pacino). The latter maneuvers within CBS to get Wigard’s documentation of Big Tobacco’s addiction-fostering ways on “60 Minutes.” A good movie, which is probably borrowable through inter-library loan.
It’s based on a 1996 article in Vanity Fair magazine article by Marie Brenner titled “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Click HERE for it.
A paragraph from the DVD case: “As they soon find out, Corporate America will use all legal means at their disposal to save a billion-dollar-a-year habit. And as the corporate giants soon find out, Bergman and Wigard are honorable men, driven to smoke out the evidence.”
Substitute Big Pharma of the 2020’s for Big Tobacco of the 1990’s and add the growing clout of the Internet for a current drama playing out worldwide — but as yet without the analogous victory for reality and truth.
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Speaking of movies, HERE’s a chance to be a co-producer of one being put out by the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry. The film-in-the-making is titled “9/11: From Crime Scene to Courtroom.” It is self-described as “An Unprecedented Documentary Taking Hard evidence of 9/11 Crimes to Court.” The crime scene is the World Trade Center of Sept. 11, 2001. The courtrooms would be in New York City and Washington, D.C., where the Lawyers’ Committee has been trying to get impressive evidence of shocking federal crimes on dockets, in the face of yawning lack of interest by news media outlets. This blog has tried to do justice to the LC’s efforts in probably a dozen entries. (Among the things lacking in the 2020s so far in the effort to expose the murderous criminality and fraud is a piece like Marie Brenner’s in Vanity Fair mentioned above, and a publication like that one willing to publish it.)
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What with the Northern Hemisphere continuing to get colder and darker, some humans can probably use something cheerier, like Eleanor Bearsdsley’s story on NPR’s “Morning Edition” the other day Josephine Baker making it into the Pantheon in Paris. (Although the same humans may want to consider THESE RESERVATIONS by Washington Post guest columnist Rokhaya Diallo, headlined “No congratulations to France on Baker honor” in the Springfield Republican.) Or pick their way through a Le Monde story about Baker in the original French, like this one
Quand Joséphine Baker la résistante évoquait « sa vie de caserne » dans la presse, en 1944
Or if you don’t want to read at all, try looking at these paintings, also from France. (Thanks to a 9/11 truther Facebook friend.)
— Mark Channing Miller
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* From Meditations from the Road, a 1993 compilation of 366 quotes from The Road Less Traveled and The Different Drummer.
** Bruce Riblet Henry, for whom the walk was a perfect way to help get the word out.