About His Talk Last August: People who are interested in what’s real, and can be shown to be, regarding the three skyscraper collapses at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, should appreciate THIS illustrated article by the professional engineer Brian Thompson. It’s titled “My presentation to the fire protection engineers at my local SFPE chapter — and some discoveries I made along the way.” SFPC stands for Society of Fire Protection Engineers.

–   –   –

The First AE911Truth Billboard at Times Square: Over the weekend, HERE, I mentioned the high-tech billboard Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth has paid for (for a month?) at Times Square. It’s actually the second one. The first was a year or three ago, and it got no response from the New York Times in the way of covering one of the biggest crimes of this century. The AE911Truth website has lots of new things that may interest readers of this blog, by the way.

–   –   –

That Movie: The movie alluded to HERE is the 2017 “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

–   –   –

Other Terms for Us: Re “I like to be in Ah-MAY-ri-ca” . . . not all people in Latin America call U.S. citizens Americanos. Two terms equally if not more often used are estadounidense (“United Stateser”) or norteamericano (North American). The view that America refers to all of North and South America as one continent is expressed in the song “Somos la garganta de América,” which I couldn’t find online. The song expresses the perspective of some in Central America that that region is America’s throat.

–   –   –

‘Something New’: An Associated Press story by David Bauder about Chris Wallace leaving Fox News for CNN, HERE, contained this paragraph: “Wallace generally co-existed with Fox’s opinion side and infrequently took them on publicly, although in 2017 he said it was ‘bad form’ when opinion hosts bashed the media.” It jumped out at this blogger. I criticize the news media across the board for omitting whole categories of news and analysis that citizens in a free society can handle but don’t get to read, see or hear. Another paragraph: “Wallace said that he wanted to ‘try something new, to go beyond politics to all the things I’m interested in.’” Perhaps at CNN he’ll chip away at the self-censorship and elevate the credibility of the Fourth Estate. Perhaps not.

— Mark Channing Miller

 

The movie remake of “West Side Story” is getting a lot of attention. It’s “in all the theaters” — remember them?

Parts of several songs, including “America,” have been on the radio. I was talking with a Latina about that one. She’s seen the first movie version of “West Side Story” at least twice and tremendously enjoyed the Barrington Stage production two or three years ago, as did I. But something about the song “America” rubbed her the wrong way.

”Well, it’s propaganda,” I said.

I first saw “West Side Story” on screen with the older of my two older brothers, sometime between 1961 and 1964, at the old Union Square theater, where Barrington Stage is now. We were both blown away, as were audiences everywhere in the United States — a.k.a. America. (To great success, Barrington Stage also staged “On the Town,” with music by the amazing Leonard Bernstein, who composed the music for “West Side Story” and as well as for “Wonderful Town.”)

One isn’t being a sourpuss to point out that the song “America,” with words by Stephen Sondheim, is propagandistic. After all, “West Side Story” was conceived, put together, staged and turned into a movie during the Cold War. Propagandizing is done in various ways on a number of platforms including stage and screen.

It was a great movie, and we loved it.

But consider: America is not only what we in the United States and a lot of foreigners call our country, it’s also one of six or seven great divisions of land on the planet. If it’s one of six, then America the continent comprises North and South America; if it’s one of seven, then the United States shares North America with Canada and Mexico as well as the nations of Central America.*

Puerto Rico, where Anita and Rosalia** as well as Maria are from in “West Side Story,” is a Caribbean archipelago where since 1917 residents have enjoyed U.S. citizenship but not the vote in U.S. elections. Like Guam, it is an unincorporated territory of the United States.

In 1952, five years before “West Side Story” was first performed on stage, in Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico became a commonwealth with autonomy in internal affairs. Statehood, independence, or continued commonwealth status have been a political issue, with Puerto Ricans voting for the status quo, in 1967 and 1993 (and perhaps once or twice since then).

None of this should spoil the movie for anybody.

— Mark Channing Miller

–    –   –

* Central America is also what some in the United States call “our backyard,” an informal category that sometimes comprises the rest of Latin America, as well as the Caribbean.

** They’re the two who memorably debate in the song “America.”

I don’t read the New York Times at home. I read it at the library. It can take three or four to ten to fifteen minutes each issue. If something is particularly interesting or egregious, I’ll drop a dime or two into the copier to read it elsewhere or share. Am I cheap? Well, yes, but more important — beyond not wanting to clutter the house with reading material I won’t read, and saving trees — is that the Times is an arm of the state, in this case a vital propaganda mechanism for war and Wall Street, and I can’t justify further encouragement of its existence.

I don’t have an online subscription to the Times. I already spend too much time looking at and reading from screens. No sense adding to this burden.

I read Establishment news media to find out some of what’s going on (they screen out a lot), but also to see what they’re saying and how they say what they say.

We live in a propaganda system, as Edward Curtin patiently illustrates, having studied and taught about it, not to mention Mark Crispin Miller of News From Underground fame.

It’s political science.

And the system is by no means restricted to the United States. To one degree or another most countries have homegrown varieties.*

At the federal and state levels we have three formal branches of government in the executive, legislative and judicial. More powerful in our guided democracy is an unofficial fourth branch determining how the three formal branches operate. The overlapping news, entertainment, sports, and general-communications media control most behavior.

This afternoon the wind whistled outside. It rained this morning. It’s dark out. All of this is real.

The radio news this morning relayed gripping accounts of the record-breaking tornados in Tennessee and its region. These were real, as are the consequent suffering and efforts under way to ameliorate it and neutralize the economic damage. Tomorrow’s and Monday’s papers and TV news will put it all in forms that fit dominant paradigms. All real — physical and social factors at work.

What got me ruminating was a New York Times story picked up by several aggregators (themselves vital components on the propaganda system) headlined “Birds Aren’t Real, or Are They? Inside a Gen Z Conspiracy Theory.” Garbage news and analysis. Apparently billboards are involved in getting the ball rolling, and a savvy operator pictured somewhat rakishly in a neat hat filled the bill. Click on the link to get the flavor. I’ll read it at the library.

Funny thing is, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth — which like the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry doesn’t exist for the Times except for the Spike Lee flareup in late August — has a billboard up at Times Square trying to alert pedestrians below to the Times’s dereliction of duty in omitting a host of important facts about the September 2001 attacks which its readers might be expected to be entrusted with.

There was a movie about something like that.

Birds are real, thank God.

— Mark Channing Miller

–   –   –

*Some censorship and manipulation abroad is not so homegrown as the Central Intelligence Agency and other minders are active worldwide shaping what Laurence I. Burns called “guided democracies.”

 

 

Not Exactly A Review: Edward Curtin has turned in something good for readers of Behind the Curtain (and other blogs) to chew on about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci, but he is calling it a “meditation.” HERE it is,  titled “Robert Francis Kennedy Jr.’s Heroic Resistance to the CIA’s Continuing Covid Coup d’Etat.” I recommend it, along with (as of last night) the 38 “comments.”

Perhaps at this point Curtin, something of a polymath at least in the social sciences whose main subject in academia was sociology, realized that he needed to spend more time with the 450-page tome, now a best-seller, before turning out a full-fledged review.

–   –   –

Clarification, If One Is Needed: Last week, HERE, I “nominated” New Yorker contributor Michael Spector to review The Real Anthony Fauci for that magazine. He had written a piece headed something like “America’s Doctor” on Fauci in the spring of 2020, highly favorable to him, but that was before the new experimental vaccines had been rolled out and billions of people worldwide were being inoculated with them. Spector, being an Establishment figure (to the extent that he writes for an Establishment publication) and being on the adjunct faculty of Stanford, where he lectures on topics related to those Kennedy tackles, as well as someone who (like Kennedy) has known the doctor for decades and (unlike Kennedy) apparently thinks highly of him, should be ideal. He should be able to readably and knowledgeably critique the book and has probably read it by now. We’ll see if he and The New Yorker agree. (Fat chance? That’s what many of RFKJr.’s admirers including publisher Tony Lyons and Curtin, may think; would they be right?)

–   –   –

Other Possible Periodicals to Publish a Review: Ideally, The New York Review of Books or The London Review of Books would have the space to allow for a thoughtful and fair review and the kind of readership to read it. Harper’s Magazine would, too. The latter publication, decades ago, turned over an entire issue to a single topic or author, so this could be an option for it. The question is, in the world as it is with the news media and commentariat seemingly muzzled on certain topics, would any of this be possible? We should know before long.

— Mark Channing Miller

 

What Kennedy Book? The almost complete blocking by mainstream media outlets of any word about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health is appalling. This prohibition on the part of the Establishment press controllers represents their extreme aversion to anything factually countering government policy on a range of matters including the worldwide coronavirus phenomenon and how to deal with it.

In the short term, there are two things people with access to the Internet can do about it immediately. They can listen to two interviews. In the first, HERE, James Corbett of The Corbett Report talks with the author on Nov. 19, a day or two after the book was published. In the second, HERE, Tom Woods of The Tom Woods Show talks on Dec. 4 with Tony Lyons, president of Skyhorse Publishing; their chat is headed “Media Blackout Greets RFK Jr.’s New Book on Fauci.”

The blackout is not absolute, as Tucker Carlson’s interview, HERE, with the author attests. The other day I called it “exceptional” because as far as I know it is so far the only exception to the mainstream media’s prohibition of any mention of the book. Also, the blackout is not absolute because Internet outlets are part of the media. But why should it exist at all apart from fear of free and open discussion?

— Mark Channing Miller

Well, it’s 7:44 on Sunday evening, and no Weekender even started. This entry will have to suffice. — MCM

–   –   –

I haven’t seen any paper today but am guessing there’s not a word about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health; there hasn’t been a peep on the radio either. There was Tucker Carlson’s exceptional interview with the author on his Fox TV show, in which Kennedy did get to summarize some of what’s in the book, which is having an online afterlife. But the book deserves long, well-done reviews.

It’s good that Edward Curtin of Behind the Curtain has pledged to write one — which will be picked up on other blogs — but as he probably knows by now and all would-be reviewers should know, The Real Anthony Fauci is going to be a bear to review because of the sheer tonnage of info* in it.

Paragraph after paragraph, page after page, RFKJr. packs it in, and readably so despite the scientific and statistical nature of his subject matter. He says he’s been on Dr. Fauci’s case for 40 years. Pity the poor Establishment slob who tries to refute his arguments. Better for opponents to just pretend Kennedy doesn’t exist, the way mainstream media outlets have done (after the first few months) with anything proving the official 9/11 narrative was/is fraudulent.**

What follows (after those three dashes) is, verbatim, an example of two paragraphs from the book, beginning with the author’s subtitle:

– –   –

How CDC Hid The Wave of Vaccine Deaths

According to Dr. Fauci, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the White House, and most mainstream media, we now have “a pandemic of the unvaccinated, with 95 to 99 percent of COVID-related hospitalizations and deaths being attributed to the unvaccinated. As I mentioned above, the estimates are the product of systematic deception of the public — and presumably of the President —by America’s top regulators. So how did CDC go about deceiving President Biden?

One of CDC’s bold deceptions is to hide vaccine mortalities in US data by counting all people as “unvaccinated” unless their deaths occur more than two weeks AFTER the second vaccine. (Ironically, CDC doubles down on this fraud by counting many of these vaccine deaths as COVID deaths.) In this way, CDC captures that wave of deaths that occurs after vaccination and attributes them all to “unvaccinated.” This is only one of many statistical chicaneries that the CDC employs to hide vaccine injuries and to stoke public fears of COVID.

–   –   –

(The above subhead and two paragraphs, to repeat, are from the book.)

Reviewers wishing to assimilate, readably, the most important facts in the book will encounter this problem, among others: there are so many of them, and many are so shockingly revelatory, that they will be challenging to arrange. That so many passages — sometimes two or three in the same paragraph — are astounding in themselves makes summarizing the information exceedingly difficult, especially as the revelations involve lots and lots and lots of statistics.

As I mentioned before, The Real Anthony Fauci would benefit from an index. It could also use a glossary. One shouldn’t have to visit the Internet to find a definition suitable for the lay reader of, say, pathogenic priming, or go looking for a definition earlier in the book. Perhaps future editions will have both index and glossary; not every reader will want to consult the free online companion to this book accessible by what amounts to wizardry for technically challenged individuals.

It’s getting late. Enough for now.

— Mark Channing Miller

–   –   –

* Somehow, mainstreamers will call his case “misinformation.”

** The reason this blog and related walk got started in the first place.

I was looking for another book this morning when I came across a 1969 hardcover copy of The Establishment Is Alive and Well in Washington, by one of the two maestros of humorous column writing of the mid- to late 20th century, Art Buchwald. I had paid probably 50 cents for it used a decade or three ago so it didn’t owe me anything, but the title jumped out. The Establishment is still alive and well in Washington, where corporate interests reign.

If Buchwald and fellow humor columnist Russell Baker were still alive and writing, either would do well to train his sights on fellow Establishment columnists and reporters and editors who serve the Establishment so well that readers and TV news watchers blame elected politicians and whatever (major) political party for problems — while not realizing that without the Establishment-serving columnists and reporters and editors, the Establishment-serving elected office-holders couldn’t serve the Establishment so well, to the detriment of majorities in “our democracy” which they might be expected to be trying to serve.

In short, to paraphrase the late Marshall McLuhan, the media is the problem.

The media that the Establishment (corporate) media tirelessly blame for “misinformation” are the uncontrollable independent (often retired) individuals trying to figure things out — often with the help of non-Establishment, non-corporate media authorities.

How often, for instance, have newspaper readers and TV news watchers been reminded that the pharmaceutical industry (raking in the money from vaccines, free from any liability thanks to Congress) vies with the weapons-manufacturers for the title of most powerful/influential single one of the Establishment interests in Washington? Often enough?

What interests benefit from the current government/media fixation on vaccines and vaccine mandates as the cure-all globally for the coronavirus pandemic?  Why, pharmaceutical ones.

I know that I am led to this line of thinking because I am reading Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new book, The Real Anthony Fauci, which has not — to my knowledge — been reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, or an other publication Americans are encouraged to look to for guidance. Maybe soon a decent, even negative, review will show up in an Establishment publication, and if this happens I’ll make note of it.

–   –   –

In the meantime, how about THIS opinion column headed “Two-faced COVID madness” Wednesday in my local daily, The Berkshire Eagle, by Paul Waldman, who writes a blog affiliated with the (Establishment) Washington Post? Waldman takes off after a congresswoman named Nancy Mace. On one TV program she likes what natural immunity can do against Covid, while on another TV program says “I have been a proponent of vaccinations.”

For Waldman, natural immunity is “dangerous lunacy.” Mace has been in favor of vaccines. So is Robert Kennedy Jr., who describes himself as not anti-vaccine across the board but skewers Dr. Fauci for promoting vaccines (along with Bill Gates) as the answer to everything coronavirus.

For my money,  Waldman’s is an exemplary propagandandistic hit piece aimed not so much at Mace as at Americans who question the government/media insistence that vaccine, vaccine, vaccine is the answer to Covid. Waldman, an openly left-of-center writer with close-to-zero medical or scientific credentials, has latched onto the establishmentarian side of the divide on combatting Covid. Readers of the blog you are reading now would do well to click on his column and note the loaded language.

Get vaccinated, he urges — while employing “conspiracy theory” (the term) twice and lamely throwing up a couple of straw men to swat down. The column is without substance. Do read it for the lessons in dubious rhetoric it can teach. He targets a politician, but also everyone out there including his readers who don’t swallow the one-sided and overly simplistic government/media line.

Would Art Buchwald or Russell Baker be amused? Would either do a column lampooning Waldman? That’s doubtful, because he’s a fellow journalist. Who knows? But it’s not funny.

— Mark Channing Miller

I nominate Michael Spector as possibly the best person to review Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new book, The Real Anthony Fauci.

Spector is a writer for The New Yorker magazine and is or has been adjunct professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. In the spring of 2020 he wrote a long piece about Dr. Fauci, “How Anthony Fauci Became America’s Doctor.” Last year also, his audio book, Fauci, came out. He would seem to be the most authoritative person in this country to assess Kennedy’s book, which casts a skeptical eye on Dr. Fauci’s role in guiding how the United States and other countries have dealt with the novel coronavirus.

Spector appears to be a Fauci fan. (HERE is his New Yorker piece.) Kennedy is not. In previous entries I have written favorably about the book on Nov. 17, 18, 21 and 23. (Click on each numbers to read.) But what do I know? So far, though, I have not seen any references to reviews in the news media.

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P.S. Roughly four hours after completing the above “nomination,” just before supper, an hour ago I came across THIS RECOMMENDATION by Edward Curtin of “Behind the Curtain,” who I’m delighted (but not surprised) to see is working on a review of The Real Anthony Fauci himself.

Curtin appeals to his readers to view an hour-long interview of the book’s author by Tucker Carlson of Fox News on “Tucker Carlson Today.”

I’ll just add that just as Kennedy’s book would benefit from an index, so the online version of the televised interview would benefit from a transcript.

— Mark Channing Miller

PICTURE A full-page house ad in what is regarded as the most authoritative newspaper in the United States, with lettering in black on a muted yellow background. It looks something like this.

The truth
takes a journalist

More than 1,700 journalists work for The New York Times.
They come from Iraq, Iowa and everywhere in between.
They include doctors, former service members, business
graduates and lawyers. They also include a son who bonded
with his mother over kimchi, a woman who chose a school
for her daughter in a segregated city and a man who got his
start in journalism while attending college — and working
two jobs. They’re people who have dedicated their lives to
helping us understand the world.

The New York Times

–   –   –

AND THEN there is this message from Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth about their new billboard on Times Square aimed at the mangers who keep the journalists in line. Click HERE to see the billboard and read a few paragraphs about why it’s where it is.

–   –   –

IN YESTERDAY’S Times Ben Smith’s  weekly “The Media Equation” feature is devoted to the thorny question of truth. It is headed

New Words
To Label
The Truth

and begins, “On Friday afternoons this fall, news executives have dialed into a series of off-the-record Zoom meetings led by Harvard academics whose goal is to ‘help newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation.’” Read it all HERE courtesy of the Washingtonian magazine.

One observer’s guess is that some of the attendees would like to meet elsewhere, in person, to discuss getting the word out comprehensively about, say, the September 2001 terror attacks or the worldwide coronavirus mess of the past two years.

–   –   –

OVER AT the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, the work continues to get the movie “9/11: From Crime Scene to Courtroom” produced. See this last Sunday’s Weekender or the LC’s website for a bit more. Movies like the ones AE911Truth, the LC and others have to make — there are probably a dozen of them — would be unnecessary if our newspapers would do their jobs.

–   –   –

MEANWHILE, those two organizations are competing with thousands of others today, “Giving Tuesday,” for some bucks from thankful supporters. No time like the present to help.

— Mark Channing Miller