Edward Curtin scooped The Times. His “Bob Dylan at Eighty: A Masked Man in Search of Redemption” yesterday (online HERE) sought to figure out the elusive man whose oeuvre is not over.

Today for the Times in ink on newsprint, Jason Zinoman’s “Dylan Is Also a Master Jester” (online HERE), while readable and containing truths, marginalizes the man by slicing parts of his creative career for a  conformist sandwich. Certain things are not ready for prime time. Not yet fit to print.

Curtin adapts a chapter of his 2020 book, Seeking Truth In a Country of Lies, continuing to see Dylan as someone in and out of hiding as he sees fit.

That is not an option for Zinoman, a jester himself. For him, here at least, Dylan is a pop star with a sense of humor. He deserves a place “in the pantheon of great Jewish funny men.” “But the first prank Dylan pulled was posing as a plain-spoken truth-teller.” A photo caption reads, “His lyrics could be silly or goofy.”

A year ago, Jeff Morley foresaw Zimoman’s plight. In “The New York Times Evades Dylan’s JFK Challenge,” he critiques an interview in the newspaper between historian Douglas Brinkley and the man who had just released “Murder Most Foul.” (Read Morley — and commentators — and listen to the song HERE.)

As befits a custodian of the website jfkfacts.org, Morley is not evasive. Just the opposite.

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Find another “Happy Birthday” to Bob Dylan HERE. It’s by James Howard Kunstler of “The End of Suburbia” and The Long Emergency fame, more recently all-purpose arch-critic of President Biden. I’m happy I didn’t come across it until sending in the parts above the dashes. It’s no less true than they are, just less in keeping with the main purposes of this blog.

— Mark Channing Miller

Christopher Sorensen writes authoritatively in “A People’s Guide to the War Industry” on what he calls the military industrial congressional complex. It is the first of five articles by him to be relayed by Consortium News. Sorensen’s book Understanding the War Industry was published last year by Clarity Press.

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Catherine Austin Fitts speaks authoritatively about possible connections between the Covid virus, central banks and “a complete digital control system” (including mind control) worldwide. The 48-minute interview is titled “Mr. Global’s Bid for Economic Totalitarianism and Transhumanism — IF We Allow It.” Portions are transcribed in the link. Parts have been exempted for the film “Planet Lockdown.”

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The second item above was linked by Edward Curtin in his essay “Second Stage Terror Wars,” mentioned in this blog last Friday (“What’s Going On?”).

— Mark Channing Miller

Justice is what love looks like in public. — Cornell West

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Happy Centennial Daniel!: So far this month, Edward Curtin has graced his Behind the Curtain blog with two typically brilliant pieces of reporting and analysis. The first is simply a digital reprint of what he wrote the day after the priest Daniel Berrigan died five years ago at 95. Curtin, then 24, met Berrigan, then 47, and over the years kept in touch with the man who changed his life permanently. 

Titled “Walking with Fr. Daniel Berrigan, S.J., a Criminal for Peace,” it is also in Curtin’s Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies (Clarity Press, 2020). While one can read “Walking,” including readers’ comments, online for free, the book is a keeper. With luck a companion volume will contain readers’ comments on the more than 40 essays in Seeking that people first read as blog entries.

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Philip Who?: Curtin’s other entry so far this month is on how Covid-19 and the pharmaceuticals produced in response have been reported and misreported. “Second Stage Terror Wars” will take some time to get through, particularly if one explores some of the nearly 50 links in it. (Through them readers can enter whole worlds of reality that are brand new to them — sometimes known as “rabbit holes.”)

Noted in “Second Stage” is that Philip Zelikow was named to lead the new nongovernmental Covid Commission Planning Group. He was the Bush-Cheney administration functionary who as 9/11 Commission executive director controlled the crafting of its 2004 report on the September 2001 terrorist attacks (not including the anthrax terrorist attacks of that month) to bury inconvenient truths. Zelikow’s responsibility in this position will be the same, although he may not have the clout or credibility he formerly had.

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‘History Can Be Erased — It Often Has Been’: That was headline in our local paper over an op-ed column by Charles Blow of the New York Times. (Read it HERE in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.) The history he talks about is mostly that of the massacre in 1921 that wiped out a whole section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. White residents aided by National Guard soldiers killed hundreds of blacks  and left thousands homeless. Blow says that when a lawyer tried to teach about it in the late 1940s her students at the University of Tulsa her students “didn’t believe her.”

He then shows why, quoting from his own newspaper: “After the massacre, officials set about erasing it from the city’s historical record. Victims were buried in unmarked graves. Police records vanished. The inflammatory Tulsa Tribune articles were cut out before the newspapers were transferred to microfilm.”

Decades later the scrubbing of Tulsa atrocity records was repeated after the September 2001 terrorist attacks (in the scrubbing of which Zelikow was scrubber-in-chief). The FBI continues to withhold “classified” mountains of 9/11 evidence, presumably because its release would evaporate the mythology clouding the attacks.

Blow cites several examples from American history and continues, “We are horrible transmitters of the truth. We are horrible receptors.”

What about that first person plural pronoun?

He concludes similarly: “We absorb the stories we are told, too often without circumspection, imbuing them with the authority of the tell. So, when authorities tell a lie or diminish something, many people will accept it as told.”

The columnist is writing about Tulsa, but also about 9/11. He and colleagues know full well the government accounts of the September 2001 terrorist attacks are hokum. Higher-ups, though, have decided that facts exposing it as such are not yet “fit to print.” When will they be?

Until they are, not only history but science has been erased.

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Here Are Three Marvin Gaye Songs: “What’s Going On” and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” and “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).” Click on each to listen.

They are from the tribute to Gaye, HERE, on NPR’s “Morning Edition” this morning. Fifty years ago today Gaye’s smash hit album “What’s Going On” was released. At least some of the songs expressed his frustration with all manner of things not being reported right if at all.

— Mark Channing Miller

Why People Don’t Trust Vaccines: That’s the headline over a guest column by Nina Burleigh in today’s New York Times. (Click on it to read if you subscribe.) Twice in two paragraphs she employs the term “conspiracy theories.”

One reason for “vaccine hesitancy,” the best-selling author writes, “is what I call Cold War bad science.” Burleigh cites “the effects of open-air nuclear weapons tests, mind-control experiments by the C.I.A. on unwitting victims, the secret goings-on at Area 51 in the Nevada desert and the clandestine development of bioweapons at an Army base in Maryland ….”

“For decades,” she points out, “various industries and their handmaidens in politics [denied] scientific facts to maximize unregulated profit-making — the sugar industry’s fight with science over obesity, for example, the tobacco industry’s dismissals of the danger of smoking and the climate change denial movement.”

News organizations delayed coverage. Today, they don’t mention persistent scientific and legal challenges to U.S. government Executive Branch accounts of the 9/11 atrocities.

On the science they are joined by the pillars of academia. It took a team at the University of Alaska Fairbanks College of Engineering and Mines led by professor Leroy Hulsey to conclude after a peer-review examination of nearly five years:

“… fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST [the National Institute of Standards and Technology] and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. …  the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”

That is, controlled demolition leveled the 37-story World Trade Center skyscraper. In the United States only a Fairbanks TV station covered the study’s findings. Elsewhere they weren’t disputed, just ignored.

No wonder so many distrust government and media urgings to social distance, wear masks and get your shots. Burleigh has had hers.

— Mark Channing Miller

‘20 Years On from 9/11’ — That’s Allison Ferns of BBC Radio Sussex introducing her interview with a brother of Geoff Campbell, whose family is seeking an inquest in the U.K. court system into his death at the World Trade Center in New York during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

There’s nothing brand new about the Campbell family’s pursuit of the inquiry. What is new is that the conversation is on a mainstream media show. As Architects & Engineers points out HERE, the show’s consideration of the matter follows last month’s major story on it in the British tabloid the Daily Mail.

The three segments of the show on the Campbells and 9/11 begin at minutes 1;07, 2:08 and 3:11 — about 30 minutes in all in the four-hour show, but they will be isolated by the A&E people and presented by themselves … any day now.

Reinvestigate 9/11 — One of Fern’s radio interviews is with Ian Henshall of Reinvestigate 9/11. A look at that group’s site turned up this description of the Campbell’s quest:

”The reopening of Geoff’s inquest under the UK Coroners Act of 1988 provides a uniquely promising opportunity to establish in a court of law that the destruction of the Twin Towers was caused by pre-planted explosives and incendiaries and not by the impact of the airplanes, as cited in the first inquest.

“For a new inquest to be ordered, the Campbells only need to show that the coroner in the first inquest did not have all the material facts and that the new evidence may change the original verdict.”

Roger Waters comments HERE on a British judge’s decision on Jan. 4 blocking the journalist Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States. Waters is best known as a founder and member of the band Pink Floyd. (Thanks to a Facebook friend for sending it out.)

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Carole Owens asks on this past Thursday’s Berkshire Eagle op-ed page: “If America is essentially an idea, and the idea made manifest is mere words on paper, for example the Constitution, how then could anyone overthrow that government?”

She answers: “Steal the words; corrupt and contort their meaning.” As an example, Owens cites an aim of the Communist Party organ Pravda (a Russian word for truth) in the Soviet Union: “to shape a narrative, however untrue, that bolstered the government.”

She quotes U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, as saying, in March, “What our government depends on is the First Amendment, not necessarily journalism. Journalism is fine as long as they’re actually adhering to the First Amendment.”

The Eagle columnist says Jordan’s assertion is “the exact opposite” of the First Amendment’s message, and quotes it in full: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

”Our Founding Fathers were not laying down the law to control or direct the press,” she writes. “They were not asking the press to adhere to the law. Our Founding Fathers were laying down the law to control government. The First Amendment demands the government adhere to the law.”

Eagle subscribers can read the whole column, headlined in the newsprint version, “Power lies in words and truth,” HERE.

Not What They Meant? — Readers of this blog probably have noticed that I can take things out of context and apply them to matters 9/11, when the writer or speaker didn’t necessarily intend something to be about 9/11 or 9/11 truth at all (at least consciously).

Recent examples involving an Episcopal priest (twice) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (once) are HERE, HERE and HERE.

Well, HERE is another example. It’s from a mid-April George Will column, headlined in the Springfield Republican “Supreme Court should referee Big Tech.” The column begins, “Athough reticent during oral arguments before the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas can be bold in written opinions bristling with strong conviction, of which he has many and about which he is forthright.”

The column says nothing about 9/11 or 9/11 truth. It concerns Justice Thomas’s written opinion on, in Will’s words, “the power, and the proper characterization, of social media and tech companies.”

But toward the end, Will writes, “People with a wholesome devotion to liberty have a healthy wariness about government compelling private companies to behave as appendages of government.”

Private media companies including notably the Washington Post and the New York Times have been behaving for years now as appendages of government when it comes to evaluation of facts differing with the Executive Branch narrative regarding the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Are they being compelled by government, or by advertisers not keen on opening this container of annelids?

Will is among the many commentators who have been reticent on this, in his column and on TV.

Government Scence — I am impressed by (what I see as) the high quality of science articles in the New York Times on any day, but particularly in the newspaper’s Science section every Tuesday. (I won’t give examples because readers without Times subscriptions will be met by a paywall; the newspaper wants to stay in business.)

But on the physics and chemistry of the destruction of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and a third skyscraper, Builing 7, on Sept. 11, 2001, the Times has been mum since a few weeks after that event. The same goes for the destruction at the Pentagon that day and the crash of … something … in a rural Pennsylvania field.

Like the Washington Post and every other newspaper (and radio and TV news outlet) in the United States, the Times cedes all discussion of the scientific oddities of Executive Branch explanations to the Internet. It shows no interest in getting mountains of documents and video recordings classified by the FBI and the Department of Justice declassified. Organizations including Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry simply don’t exist in pages of the Times (or the Washington Post).

What Is a Meme? — Someone interviewed on NPR’s “Morning Edition” program one morning this month (April) used the word “meme” in referrence to challenges (by unnamed people) to the Executive Branch narrative about the WTC buildings’ collapsing. She said something like “the meme that airplane fuel wouldn’t burn hot enough to melt the girders” the way the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) reports say they did. The NPR reporter apparently didn’t ask, “What do you mean ‘meme’?”

Here’s what one dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, says it means: “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture” (11th edition, 2003).

I think of “meme,” which M-W says has been around since 1976, as a put-down word, something a bit suspect, not to be accorded much status outside of, say, establishment sources of information.

— Mark Channing Miller

On Thursday, Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute sent out the second article in a series of five by him. They are from a book he has coming out in September, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. (Click on More …  for the whole second article.) — MCM

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‘The Evolution of Social Power’ / By Richard Heinberg 

We are all enmeshed in fascinating and often daunting webs of social power. From laws to police and prisons, to armies and weaponry, to fame and high political office, to paychecks and taxes, to debt and credit, to advertising and public relations, to propaganda, to household and workplace gender dynamics, to organizational chains of command, to extremes of wealth and poverty, people have found endless ways of modifying one another’s behavior to suit their wants and needs.

These proliferating abilities to influence others are rooted in nature. All social animals have hierarchies (like the pecking order in my backyard flock of hens), and some animals are territorial, excluding others of their kind from access to mating opportunities or food. Some creatures (like ants) have even evolved a clearly defined division of labor. But we humans have managed to take social organization to extremes, empowering some and disempowering others in ways that are sometimes brutal beyond comprehension. How and why have we done this?

As a result of decades of work by anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, and biologists, answers are falling into place. It turns out that the chief initial players in the drama of evolving social power were language, food, fighting, and reproduction. More …

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For information about the book and how to join a pre-release reading and discussion group please see postcarbon.org/power. To read the first article in the series, see Museletter #337 or https://www.x-ma911truthwalk.com/power/.

There is evidence gathered over a few minutes, much of it in the form of bodycam video recording, of vital importance in the outcome of a possible court case. News media organizations emphasize this. There is other evidence, some in the form of still photos and video recordings of events, of vital importance in helping to shed light on the murder of thousands of people in the United States in a single day. News media organizations do not emphasize this; they bury it or bar it altogether.

Last week, 42-year-old Andrew Brown Jr., a black father of seven, was shot dead in Elizabth City, North Carolina, as sheriff’s deputies tried to serve a warrant for his arrest. The car he had been driving reportedly first came into contact with one of the deputies and then with another, but at the time of the fatal gunshot he reportedly had two hands on the steering wheel and the car was stationary. Injuries to the deputies, if any, were not reported.

This occurred on Wednesday, April 21. At issue today, a week later, is whether a judge would release to the public body cam video of the incident, some of which members of Brown’s family were allowed to see.

An NPR “Morning Edition” segment today, headlined “N.C. Court Considers Release of Bodycam Video, Brown Family Releases Autopsy,” is HERE (scroll down for it).

CNN’s coverage this afternoon, headlined “Andrew Brown shooting: Judge denies media request for videos, but allows family to view reccordings,” is HERE.

This is a national story — one of many like it — and will continue to be. Available video recordings in a number of fatal shootings of blacks by law enforcement personnel have been routinely part of the cases in 2020 this and 2021. Some are decisive in court.

The Elizabeth City incident is sketched here because the FBI and the Department of Justice have withheld considerable evidence from the public about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States. It has been classified for nearly 20 years. When in September 2018 the U.S. Senate resolved unanimously that it should be declassified, this was news nowhere — not in the New York Times, not in the Washington Post, not in the Associated Press, nowhere. HERE is some coverage, though. HERE is later coverage.

What is going on?

— Mark Channing Miller