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).

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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.

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— 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

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* 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!

The way you get democracy to function is by informing the public. — Robert Kennedy

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By now millions of people will have read Thomas L. Friedman’s column from the New York Times headlined “Only truth can save our democracy.” (That was the headline also in this morning’s Berkshire Eagle, the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the Salt Lake Tribune, where it may be read online HERE, and elsewhere. A blogger used “The Trump presidency and the normalization of lying.”

“On Saturday morning,” Friedman begins, “I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife, Ann, who was stirring her Cream of Wheat, when out of nowhere she surprised me with a question: ‘Is not lying one of the Ten Commandments?’”

The trouble is, the column could seem to imply that lying in government and politics began with Republicans and Donald Trump’s first campaign for the presidency, which included signing on to the pre-existing “birther” baloney that Barack Obama was born outside the United States.

Anyway, lying includes lies of omission. Everyone at the Times including their many Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners knows that the government/news media narratives about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are false. As are a host of other government/new media narratives defended by the Times when it has looked the other way.

My hunch is Friedman wrote the column not just for the multitudes, but for higher-ups at the Times and at news organs elsewhere who keep reporters away from forbidden topics. 

The column ends, “We need to restore the stigma to lying and liars before it is too late. We need to hunt for truth, fight for truth and mercilessly discredit the forces of disinformation. It is the freedom battle of our generation.”

— Mark Channing Miller

It’s another sunny day in the Berkshires. Are any of the items in this entry related to 9/11 TRUTH? Yes. All of them.

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Holy Madness, Batman! — Richard Rohr is on a roll (he usually is), His meditation for today, titled “Love is Our Deepest Identity,” is HERE. 

The mass murder of Sept. 11, 2001 (one really sunny day on the East Coast), was always about getting a string of wars going by instilling fear in the U.S. populace. Particularly pertinent in this regard is this part of Rohr’s message:

When we live out of this truth of love, instead of the lie and human emotion of fear, we will at last begin to live. Love is always letting go of a fear. In the world of modern psychologizing, we have become very proficient at justifying our fears and avoiding simple love. The world will always teach us fear. Jesus will always command us to love. And when we seek the spiritual good of another, we at last forget our fears and ourselves.

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For Fairness in Georgia — Independent investigative reporter Greg Palast has championed electoral fairness in a number of places. (He’s got this thing about the misuse of power.) Right now for reasons he states HERE, it’s the state of Georgia. Peachy! Truth is contagious. I’m thinking he hopes to motivate non-Georgians to help Stacy Abrams’ cause there. (It’s about fairness.)

Palast has been on the case of former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach for awhile. See THIS VIDEO (and assorted links) for his take on how Kobach has been spreading what sure seems to be unfairness across the land when it comes to voting. WARNING: It does not reflect well on the Republican Party.

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Count All the Votes — Vice President Mike Pence says all the votes need to be counted carefully, especially in suspicious voting districts where the number of Republican ballots have been deemed insufficient. Fair enough. Trump apologist James Howard Kunstler (he used to be a peak oiler and may still be *) seconds the vice president’s motion HERE in a post called “Fore !” (He questions the nation’s news media and the “intelligence community” for good reason. Imagine.)

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Conspiracy Theorist Confesses to Shoplifting — He apologizes for it HERE. (He puts his own crimes in context.) WARNING: This man has been down the rabbit hole so many times he has lost his ability to believe everything he reads in the New York Times.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* I still am.

It’s still sunny in these parts of the United States of Anxiety in the land of Fear. (Or at least the time of Fear.) (Will the Associated Press and the rest of the media next determine that Fear (fear) shall be upper case from now on, and if only partially so, in when shall it be up and when down?

Sometime this year of Fear (or fear), Black went up but white stayed down. (This was much to the chagrin of Dennis Prager, who wrote about it HERE in The Epoch Times. I agree with Prager, and agreed with him before reading the column headlined “Why Are They Capitalizing ‘Black’?” I had not heard of him before then.)

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One reason this has been the century of fear is that the powers that be—the ones who pulled off the mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States (which led to mass murder and mayhem elsewhere, which helped the cause of arms manufacturers and “good union jobs” where some employees are unionized)—want it to be.

The 9/11 attacks blamed entirely on Muslim extremists were followed quickly by the anthrax-letters terror beginning days later. Barbara Honegger, Mick Harrison and David Meiswinkle (brilliant, each one of them) give an update on their (and others’) research HERE (scroll down for their presentation eight Fridays ago). (It bears re-watching; there really should be a transcript of the 55-minute update and perhaps will be soon.)

The three speak in their own separate capacities rather than for the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, of which they are board members.

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Two days later, seven Sundays ago, Honegger, Harrison, Meiswinkle and others pulled together a discussion about three times as long, which can be found HERE. (It also deserves its own transcript.)

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And now Covid.

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— Mark Channing Miller

It’s Ray Day in the United States of Anxiety. Or Rays Day.

It is, at least, in the small corner populated by the few people who occasionally read this blog. For the third straight day the sun’s brilliant rays pour down upon Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the penultimate town on the walk Bruce Henry and I took across the commonwealth from Provincetown in 2018 wearing phosphorescent “9/11 TRUTH” signs fore and aft. (Bruce doesn’t read this blog unless prompted to by me — although he came up with its website address name, https://x-ma911truthwalk.com.)

Readers are hereby* invited to take a few minutes away from post-election uncertainties and continuing Covid-19 uncertainties (and economic uncertainties and Earth-warming uncertainties) to consider some Rays.

Briefly, and in order of their mental appearance this morning:

*  James Earl Ray, the small-time criminal framed for the government assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The framing was successful until the work of the valiant Atty. William F. Pepper got him posthumously exonerated by a Memphis jury in 1999. Ray was finally exonerated even in the pages of The Washington Post. (See Pepper’s book The Plot to Kill King [Skyhorse Publishing, 2016.]) (The New York Times still clings to the hoary lie that Ray did the deed rather than just serve as an elaborately set-up patsy. And the rest of the media stays mum.)

*  David Ray Griffin,** author of at least 10 books laying to waste establishment accounts of the 9/11 false-flag mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001, any one of which books will reward readers not previously acquainted with Griffin.

*  Ray Bradbury, whose short story “Rocket Man” inspired Elton John to write and perform his “Rocket Man” (Listen to it HERE or HERE) in 1972. (Books by Bradbury, best known for the novel Fahrenheit 451, are available in most libraries.) (Pepper’s and Griffin’s are not, but can be borrowed though interlibrary loan.)

*  Ray Girard, a slightly senior (to me) and slightly wild (especially compared to me) colleague at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette the two summers I worked there. We shared an apartment in Marlborough the first summer, when I met Phil Ochs (1940 – 1976) through the grooves of his then-new 1966 album “Phil Ochs in Concert” owned by Ray.

*  Ray Lamont, a sports reporter for the Berkshire Eagle in the 1970s (when I first knew him) who ended his career several newspapers later as top editor of the Beverly Times; he retired there shortly before his death this year. Jovial, loving, thoughtful and frequently stammering, after work Ray would sometimes lead everyone (or many) present at Del Gallo’s in a few stanzas of what he said was the Soviet Union’s national anthem (“Dong DONG dong da dong dong, dong dong da dong dong …” — no one knew the words***) before or after we had sung a verse of the Marseilles (everyone knew some of the words).

*  Ray (for Remo) Del Gallo, second-generation proprietor of Del Gallo’s Restaurant, a former Pittsfield mayor, and soft-spoken counselor to many.

— Mark Channing Miller

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*  President Trump said yesterday he “hereby” declared victory in Michigan, to which NPR’s Mara Liasson reminded listeners that “it doesn’t work that way.”

** Pathetically, Wikipedia opens its biography of Griffin with “an American 9/11 conspiracy theorist^[2] and retired professor of philosophy of religion and theology.”

*** Sticklers will say what we actually sang was “Dulng DULNG dulng da dulng dulng, dulng dulng da dulng dulng ….” But maybe it wasn’t in fact the Soviet Union’s national anthem. Music and lyrics to that are HERE.

Mark Crispin Miller sat down with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently for a fascinating conversation about, among other things, mandates on the wearing of face masks and how and why they came about. Click HERE to listen and watch. It’s an hour long but well worth the time.

There should be a transcript. Among the related topics touched on are the left, diminished democracy, propaganda, and censorship (including “shadow banning”).

Miller and I are not related. He is a tenured professor in New York University’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication and is currently taking heat for asking his students to do their own research into the wearing of face masks.

Miller runs a free service called News From Underground. Click on that link for more about it and him.

— Mark Channing Miller

The biggest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution that has to start with each one of us. — Dorothy Day (1897-1980) 

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. — Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895)

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In Black and White

The latest issue of The Catholic Worker came today. Leading page 1 is a reprinted article by Christina Ellsberg that begins:

“In the hours and days following the massacre of an unknowable number of hundreds of thousands of residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers christened it ‘the greatest scientific achievement in history.’ President Harry Truman went on the air in grainy black and white to describe it as a victorious ‘scientific gamble’: ‘We won,’ he said simply.”

Over it, the headline “People of God, Rise and Disarm.”

Elsewhere on page 1: 

*  A reprinted 1959 essay by Dorothy Day titled “On Pilgrimage.” Its third paragraph reads: “We also know that religion, as the Marxists have always insisted, has, too often, like an opiate, tended to put people to sleep to the reality and the need for the present struggle for peace and justice….” 

and

*  What looks like a woodcut by Fritz Eichenberg. In it a perching eagle surveys a scene in which a young Angela Davis lookalike astride a lion holds aloft a dove, as a bear, a lamb and a panther stand nearby and a dragon naps, while in the background another dragon straddles an airborne rocket trailing smoke.

The publication is in black-and-white on newsprint. Among other things the eight-page October-November issue also includes a look back at the police shootings of unarmed black Jackson State (Mississippi) students 40 years ago last May 4; Dorothy Day’s funeral homily 30 years ago this Dec. 2 in New York City, and book reviews.

A subscription costs a penny. One may mail one cent or more to The Catholic Worker, 36 East First St., New York, NY 10003 with a mailing address. Contact info is HERE. For more about the Catholic Worker Movement, click HERE.

Happy Halloween! It has been a busy week or so for news, but some of it has not been reported or has been undercovered, or has been buried or has appeared outside of the news columns or their digital editions or on news shows.

For example, Thursday’s New York Times had four full-page ads for “The 5G America’s been waiting for.” (Verizon’s.) Friday’s Times had two more. It’s not unreasonable to assume a connection between these and the newspaper’s downplaying into nonexistence health and other concerns about the newest and most powerful broadband cellular networks. (Verizon’s and everybody else’s.) Just as it would not be unreasonable to assume a connection between corporations’ money in politics and governments’ treatment of corporate interests.

Wikipedia assigns concerns about 5G to the “conspiracy theories” corner, where Wikipedia also puts challenges to official narratives of the Kennedy and King assassinations of the 1960s and the mountain of fabrications that is the official story of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Wikipedia and the Times have that in common.

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The New York Post has been having a ball with its exclusives about Hunter and Joe Biden’s involvement in lucrative business affairs of questionable correctness in Ukraine and about Hunter and Jim’s involvement in potentially lucrative business affairs in China — spoon fed to the pro-Trump tabloid by Rudy Giuliani. Most mainstream news media outlets have not. For them, these matters are nonmatters. Nothing at all. Not that there’s nothing to the allegations, but coverage anywhere near in proportion to their validity and significance could help re-elect President Trump.

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This week journalist Glenn Greenwald left The Intercept, the online news organization he helped start in 2013. He asserts that the editing of his story on the Post series and its reception amounted to unacceptable censorship. HERE is his most recent draft of the story. He titled it “The Real Scandal: U.S. Media Uses Falsehoods to Defend Joe Biden From Hunter’s Emails.” The Post reporting and articles about it elsewhere, Greenwald writes, “provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories.”

HERE is Matt Taibbi’s version of the whole thing on Substack, the same Internet platform Greenwald used to publish his article. And HERE is New York Times reporter Katie Robertson’s brief story on it buried inside the business section of Friday’s Times.

The Intercept’s website says it “gives its journalists the editorial freedom and legal support they need to expose corruption and injustice wherever they find it.” 

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HERE is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivering his “International Message for Freedom and Hope,” which has appeared online recently. Among other things, he talks about Children’s Health Defense and the goal of getting views expressed fairly on subjects that tend to get one-sided treatment in the media. HERE he is in August speaking before a throng of several thousand in Berlin at a Rally for Freedom and Peace..

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There’s a blue moon in the sky tonight. For Billie Holiday singing “Blue Moon” in 1952, click HERE. For The Marcels singing about it in 1961, click HERE.

There’s some kind of moon in the sky every night. For The Capris singing about it in 1961, click HERE.

— Mark Channing Miller

This is Craig McKee’s summary of “Big Picture Sunday,” the third and final day of the online “Justice Rising: 9/11 in 2020” conference held seven weekends ago. Click HERE for the same summary presented more legibly plus three videos of the day’s sessions, on the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth website, for which McKee wrote it.

Justice Rising Day 3 – 9/11 Truth in Wider Context

By Craig McKee

Over the first two days of the Justice Rising conference, we learned about where the 9/11 Truth Movement has been, what it is doing now, and where it is heading. On the third and final day, we heard about how 9/11 and related events fit into the “big picture.”

“Big Picture Sunday” featured three outstanding speakers who outlined different ways that our rights to think and speak as we choose are being steadily taken away.

In “False Flags and Wars of Terror,” Swiss historian Daniele Ganser provided us with an overview of where the “war on terror” has taken the world since 9/11 almost two decades ago. It was obvious, Ganser pointed out, that Afghanistan had not carried out 9/11 and that its people didn’t deserve the war against their country that was launched less than a month after 9/11 and that is still going 19 years later.

“It’s insane that these people are being bombed and killed for something they clearly haven’t done,” Ganser remarked.

He described how the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was likewise carried out under false pretenses — in this case under the guise of searching for weapons of mass destruction. According to Ganser, 85 percent of U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2006 believed they were there to retaliate for Saddam Hussein’s role in 9/11.

“This is really very, very sad,” Ganser said. “Saddam Hussein clearly had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with 9/11. But the corporate media just always linked 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. And so these soldiers were really brainwashed and invaded a country they didn’t know; they killed people they didn’t know.”

Iraq is far from the only example of a country being invaded based on a lie, he observed, citing the Gulf of Tonkin incident — a supposed attack by North Vietnam on U.S. naval ships that was later proved never to have actually happened. This lie was used to dramatically expand the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, which ultimately led to the deaths of some three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans.

Ganser also talked about “terror” attacks in Europe that turned out not to have been carried out by leftist extremists — as the world was told at the time — but by NATO and the CIA in a decades-long campaign known as Operation Gladio. His book NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe chronicles the deception.

The second speaker was constitutional lawyer and activist John Whitehead, who outlined how the U.S. is being turned into an increasingly Orwellian police state that punishes dissent and restricts free speech.

He recounted the story of decorated Marine Brandon Raub, a veteran of the Afghan war who was arrested and incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital because of Facebook posts he had made that were critical of President Barack Obama (suggesting he should be in prison) and that opposed the official story of 9/11. It took the filing of a lawsuit by Whitehead’s Rutherford Institute on behalf of Raub to get him released.

Whitehead explained that the U.S. government is increasingly considering those who are critical of the government or who challenge official narratives as extremists and even potential terrorists. He added that people need to understand that the “deep state” is really about the merging of corporate and government interests.

“The government we have is not the government we think we have,” he said.

Whitehead also described how the country’s police forces are being militarized under the guise of keeping people “secure.” He talked about the “donation” of military equipment to local police forces by the Pentagon based on the claim that the equipment is simply surplus to the government’s needs. The reality, Whitehead explained, is that about half of what has been donated is brand new and was acquired from large corporations for the express purpose of transferring it to police.

Closing the conference was investigative journalist James Corbett, who raised alarms over rapidly intensifying internet censorship that has been silencing alternative and dissenting voices — particularly those challenging the official narrative of 9/11 — in recent years. His talk, “The Library of Alexandria is on Fire: Internet Censorship from 9/11 to Today,” chronicled the way information challenging the truth about events like 9/11 is being purged from the internet or at least made much more difficult to find.

He compared the burning of the great, ancient Egyptian library to the censoring of data from our modern internet. While the true story of the loss of the library may not match what we’ve come to understand (he suggests that it really fell into disrepair rather than being destroyed in a single blaze), the story continues to resonate with us because it encapsulates the idea of the fragility of human knowledge, Corbett said. What we face today, he added, is that, “Those who want to make history disappear can make it disappear by starting a fire.”

For the first few years after 9/11, videos that questioned the official narrative were not hard to find on the internet. In fact, they were often marked by YouTube as “recommended” based on that person’s past viewing history. Had he not happened upon some of those videos in 2006, Corbett admitted, he might never have discovered the holes in the official account. Among the subjects he learned of for the first time was Operation Northwoods, a 1962 plan by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to carry out terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and fake attacks on American targets that would be blamed on Fidel Castro to justify an invasion of Cuba.

Coming upon this kind of information is more difficult these days as Google algorithms have been manipulated to make facts that challenge the status quo much more difficult to find, while YouTube videos and Facebook posts are taken down by the thousands.

Corbett suggested that alternative voices can be preserved if people back up all their content on hard drives and post that content publicly using alternative platforms.

“We need to stop using these controlled platforms, or at least stop using them exclusively,” Corbett cautioned, calling platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter “enemy weapons information systems.”

“They are controlled by the people who want to selectively burn the books.”

His strong advice for all of us: “Save everything. Save all those important documents you’ve come across online — text, video, audio. If you think this is information you would want to know in the future, save it.”

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I join with McKee, a Canadian journalist and filmmaker whom I have never met, in hopes that readers will watch and listen to all three of the Day 3 presentations in their entirety, as well all of the presentations from Day 1 and Day 2, “Justice Friday,” and “Science Saturday.”. — MCM