Yesterday I recommended two recent pieces of writing on energy and mentioned in passing Richard Heinberg and the Post Carbon Institute. I just visited PCI’s website and a post-election piece by Heinberg originally published by Common Dreams. 

HERE it is. It’s titled “The Real Plan? Make America Ungovernable.” It is dated Nov. 20 but is still fresh.

“The Real Plan?” is unlike other post-election summaries. It will not be comforting to many people, except those who have despaired of what the mainstream media and social media have been serving, and especially what they leave out. For many it paints an unrecognizable and impossible picture of reality.

“The Real Plan?” combines political, social, cultural and energy-resources analysis and has some recommendations at the end, the best of which is to talk with a lot with people you don’t think you agree with and listen carefully and respectfully to what they have to say.

— Mark Channing Miller 

This week has been a good one for looking into energy resources and their futures, among other things.

On Tuesday, James Howard Kunstler, a “peak oiler” since at least the start of this century, emailed out THIS essay, titled “Degrowth and How It Will Define How We Live in the Future,” which was put online last week by The American Conservative magazine.

Today, the New York Times put on page 1 Clifford Krauss’s straightforward business story headlined “As Oil Demand Declines, Exxon Is at Crossroads.”

I recommend reading both carefully starting with Kunstler’s, which summarizes some of the arguments he and other peak oilers including Richard Heinberg at the Post Carbon Institute have been putting forth for years.

From one paragraph: “Oil supports [our techno-industrial economy], and has for the past 100 years, and it makes all our fabulous amenities possible. Oil has been heading for trouble for a couple of decades and now it has arrived at the crisis point. Our supply of oil is dwindling because it costs too much to pull it out of the ground. It’s that simple. Our basic business model is broken.”

Kunstler talks mostly about what, in his view, is in store for the future.

Krauss, in today’s article, focuses on Exxon Mobil in recent decades, its competition with other energy giants, and pressures from large shareholders. He quotes Daniel Yergin, author most recently of The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations: “We’ve moved from the shale era to the energy transition era, so there is a greater divergence of strategies among the companies, the widest it’s been in modern times.” 

Yergin is the energy historian most acceptable to mainstream publications, and his books are available to check out at plenty of libraries. For Kunstler’s and Heinberg’s, readers are more likely to have to use an interlibrary loan option.

— Mark Channing Miller

“Deep state” is not in my dictionary. It would be between “deep space” and “deep structure,” followed by “deep throat” (you can look them up). If Merriam-Webster gets around to it it may have to have two or three definitions.

(Predictably, Wikipedia’s begins with “a conspiracy theory which suggests that… .” Conspiracy theories, apparently, are things left out of high school and college textbooks, going as these theories (often based on solid research) do against agreed-upon lies that Napoleon, among others, have said constitute much of history (of which journalism is said to be the first draft).

In last Thursday’s New York Times, Frank Bruni salutes some of his “deep state” heroes, according to the term’s more wholesome, benevolent sense. His include elected and appointed officials who publicly pushed back against President Trump’s more outlandish attempts to avoid leaving office in January and becoming a private, vulnerable, albeit outspoken, citizen. Bruni’s column is headed “The Deep State Is on a Roll.” He includes Republican officials in Georgia and Michigan, Anthony Fauci, and CIA and EPA people. For him, in this column, the figures in the deep state engage in “a righteous defense against the corruption of democracy.” Bruni forthrightly co-opts the term to celebrate them (just as President Trump co-opted it for his purposes), so the “rearing up” of this deep state “should be music to our ears.”

These days “deep state” has been used to describe powerful individuals in government, business and organized crime (and their operatives) suspected of assassinating people inconveniently in their way including President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Sen. Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Thomas Merton, all in the 1960s, and possibly Panama’s “Maximum Leader” Omar Torrijos and Ecuador’s elected president Jaime Roldós Aguilera, both in 1981.

Tuesday marked the 79th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, and on Monday the Springfield Republican carried a feature highlighting the recollections of Harry Chandler, 99, who as a Navy medic on the scene was in the thick of saving lives following the attack. “You were American then,” he is quoted. “It was as simple as that. Everybody in the country was together. We were all in it.”

His is a gripping story, buttressed by a photo of page 1 of that day’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin “extra” edition “WAR! OAHU BOMBED BY JAPANESE PLANES” and the news of President Roosevelt’s announcement of the attack. The next day FDR (a former undersecretary of the Navy) said, “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion the American people in their righteous might will win through to victory. … With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph — so help us God.” 

Harry Chandler again: “When you stop to think about it, every family was involved [in World War II ], some war or another. They either had children in the war or were working in a factory. Or they were selling war bonds. Everybody was doing something to help our country and each other.”

The newspaper’s feature by executive editor Cynthia Simison, is headed “Date still lives on in  infamy, vet yearns for united America.” (As of today no reference to it appears online.)

“Premeditated.” Roosevelt was describing the Japanese planning for the invasion, but he knew it could also be used for his administration’s efforts to compel the Japanese to attack, efforts so successful that he knew from intelligence intercepts days or weeks before that the air invasion was imminent, knew well enough so that although Navy admirals on site were kept ignorant of this knowledge others saw that some ships were sent out of the harbor to keep them from being destroyed.

It was a case of high-stakes gotcha, and Japan fell for it. China, the Soviet Union, Britain, the Free French (France was occupied by the Germans) and other allies or allies-to-be, wanted the United States in the war. Many Americans didn’t. The “day of infamy” at Pearl Harbor would change that, as Roosevelt calculated it would.

Accounts of this may be found HERE and HERE. Of course the “inside job” characterization of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is based on deep state involvement. The neocons at the Project for the New American Century hoped for a Pearl Harbor-like event that would kick off new wars. There’s a link to this wish HERE. And David Ray Griffin’s books on 9/11, from The New Pearl Harbor (2004) on, allude to it.

To quote Harry Chandler out of context, “Everybody in this country was together. We were all in it.”

— Mark Channing Miller

Testimony of a third eyewitness was added today (Dec. 7) in a months-long effort to get the National Institute of Standards and Technology to change its conclusion that on Sept. 11, 2001, fires caused the sudden, total destruction of World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper that was not struck by an airplane.

Click HERE to read a news release on the testimony, headed “9/11 Families and Experts Submit New Eyewitness Evidence of Explosions in Building 7.”

The release includes videos of reports by TV news correspondents and links to documents in the so-far nearly eight-month “request for correction” effort.

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

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* 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.