Where would John Lennon be on the events of the last forty years if he were alive today, at 80? Where would he be on Covid-19, the masks, the vaccines? Where would he be on the reason for this blog, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks? He is still alive in many people’s hearts and minds, mostly as a mainstay of the Beatles, secondarily as a post-Beatles personality and performer, husband of Yoko Ono.

Some Sunday newspapers are highlighting the anniversary of his death this coming Tuesday, Dec. 8. One of the tributes (the only one I’ve seen) is THIS ONE* by Ray Kelly, who remembers the day of Lennon’s being gunned down. There have to be millions of personal recollections of acute loss around the world. Most of them won’t be written down. Here’s mine:

I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing when I heard the devastating news. Lennon was not a big hero of mine, just someone I took for granted as key to my favorite band. I had returned to the United States in September after a year working in a country where English was not the primary language (but where people liked to try their English out on me), so I wasn’t up on his latest antics and songs. But I knew by heart most of the songs he had written or co-written and performed with John, George and Ringo. I have all their albums (although I rarely play them) and none of his. 

What I do remember is leaving the newsroom that evening with a colleague (who now makes a bit of money singing songs, some of them her own, while playing acoustic guitar), and walking several blocks down North Street in Pittsfield to Sammy Vincent’s, which was closed. They must have had a display in the window with photos and albums including him. No music though. We just stood there mourning. Saying nothing.

It was cold and dark and snowing, with slush underfoot. I felt as low as one can feel. Completely de-energized. Miserable.

Some of what grabbed me about Kelly’s tribute, HERE AGAIN, was that although he was much more deeply into the Beatles and Lennon than I and would continue to be so, we shared a few other things. Among of their things, “radio splits.” These were short summaries of news service stories. At the Springfield Union, Kelly gathered them early in the morning from either the AP or the UPI machine, or both. At the Hartford UPI bureau a few years before, it had been one of my tasks on the overnight shift to boil down longer Connecticut stories into all-caps radio splits for news announcers to “rip and read.” 

That probably still happens today although, especially in the Covid era, someone properly equipped can do it without leaving home. And the news announcers probably won’t use anything else not produced by their own organization’s reporters.

What would Lennon say about that? We’ll never know.

— Mark Channing Miller

–   –   –

* I read Kelly’s remisissance in the traditional newsprint Sunday Republican, which unlike the online version has a black-and-white head-and-shoulders portrait of Lennon looking right into the camera, looking serious, taken a few days before his assassination. His hair is fairly closely cropped, and he’s not performing. He could be a truck (lorry) driver, or a reporter. Another black-and-white photo, as wide as the page, shows some of the estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people gathered outside the apartment where John and Ono had lived, after attending the memorial service for him the bandshell at Central Park.

 

 

Canadian journalist and filmmaker Craig McKee recently took to the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth website to elaborate on increasing censorship by Silicon Valley giants of material at odds with official mainstream media and government accounts. 

By Craig McKee

The suppression of alternative voices on the internet, including those who challenge the official story of 9/11, is relentless. And it’s getting worse.

The censorship of non-mainstream viewpoints includes content created by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. This practice, by online giants like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, has been going on for a long time but has been reaching a fever pitch over the past two or three years.

It is particularly YouTube and its parent company, Google, whose policies have made it more difficult to find AE911Truth and its content online.

This is all being done in the name of reducing “harm” allegedly created by “extremism” and “misinformation.” Mainstream accounts of events like 9/11 are more and more being shielded from scrutiny as material challenging them is either banned or made harder to find. READ MORE …

James Corbett interviews Attorneys David Meiswinkle and Mick Harrison of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry on The Corbett Report, HERE, about the Committee’s petition to Congress for a redress of grievances related to government misconduct in the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The petition asks Congress to appoint an independent commission to investigate the bioweapon attacks that targeted two United States Senators for assassination, killed five people and injured 17 others. Coming a week after the 9/11 attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they helped catalyze quick passage of the USA PATRIOT ACT and begin the War on Terror.

Government is not free to disregard the First Amendment in times of crisis. — Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch

All sorts of things can be called emergency or disaster of major proportions. Simply slapping on that label cannot provide the ground for abrogating our most fundamental rights. — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

–   –   –

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens selected the words above to help illustrate his column arising out of the Supreme Court’s decision last week to declare unconstitutional New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s executive order in October drastically limiting attendance at houses of worship. The column, headed “Thank You, Justice Gorsuch,” may be found HERE as it appears on the Salt Lake Tribune website.

The 9/11 truth movement exists not only because the case of the mass murder* of Sept. 11, 2001, has never been solved; not only because science was corrupted in government explanations of the crashes at all three sites;** and not only because the attacks were used speciously to start a string of wars killing millions and causing incalculable destruction abroad. That is all bad enough.

Less obvious is that the USA PATRIOT Act*** abrogating Americans’ rights was swiftly enacted after the attacks and the additional terror caused days later by anonymously mailed letters containing deadly anthrax powder. Terror in the targeted population, the United States of America, did the trick. 

One doesn’t read much about the USA PATRIOT Act. It’s still on the books as far as Bruce**** and I know, in updated form. Has it been widened to further restrict rights? How often and in what ways has it been applied? We’ll try to find out and say. For now, here are two articles of the Bill of Rights to consider:

Amendment I: 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.

Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Witness shall issue , but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

— Mark Channing Miller

–   –   –

* Nearly three thousand that day alone.

** At the World Trade Center in New York City, at the Pentagon outside of Washington, DC, and in a field in Sharpsville, PA. See the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry.

***.This article may not be the best but serves to introduce.

**** Bruce Henry of Pittsfield, MA.

U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, has asked President Trump to consider pardoning former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange before leaving office. So has U.S. Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia. (Read about it HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE for some context.)

The effort wasn’t worth an item in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or on NPR, for whom Gabbard is a non-person and Greene primarily a QAnon-promoting conspiracy theorist.

Gabbard, one of the Democratic presidential aspirants who lost their party’s nomination to former Vice President Joe Biden, is leaving office herself after four terms as a Congresswoman.

Author Edward Curtin recommended the pardons to the president as well. “If Trump is truly the opponent of the Deep State, the Swamp, the corrupt establishment, he will pardon Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden who have been persecuted by these forces,” Curtin writes, HERE.

NOTE: Curtin doesn’t believe Trump is any such thing. NOTE: In Janauary 2017 then-President Barack Obama commuted the prison sentence of Manning, who was serving as 35-year term for leaking Army documents; as is explained HERE, this was not a pardon.

— Mark Channing Miller

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

–   –   –

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

–   –   –

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

–   –   –

* 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).

–   –   –

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.

[ MORE ]

— 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

–   –   –

* 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!