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