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

On Thursday, Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute sent out the second article in a series of five by him. They are from a book he has coming out in September, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. (Click on More …  for the whole second article.) — MCM

–   –   –

‘The Evolution of Social Power’ / By Richard Heinberg 

We are all enmeshed in fascinating and often daunting webs of social power. From laws to police and prisons, to armies and weaponry, to fame and high political office, to paychecks and taxes, to debt and credit, to advertising and public relations, to propaganda, to household and workplace gender dynamics, to organizational chains of command, to extremes of wealth and poverty, people have found endless ways of modifying one another’s behavior to suit their wants and needs.

These proliferating abilities to influence others are rooted in nature. All social animals have hierarchies (like the pecking order in my backyard flock of hens), and some animals are territorial, excluding others of their kind from access to mating opportunities or food. Some creatures (like ants) have even evolved a clearly defined division of labor. But we humans have managed to take social organization to extremes, empowering some and disempowering others in ways that are sometimes brutal beyond comprehension. How and why have we done this?

As a result of decades of work by anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, and biologists, answers are falling into place. It turns out that the chief initial players in the drama of evolving social power were language, food, fighting, and reproduction. More …

–   –   –

For information about the book and how to join a pre-release reading and discussion group please see postcarbon.org/power. To read the first article in the series, see Museletter #337 or https://x-ma911truthwalk.com/power/.

There is evidence gathered over a few minutes, much of it in the form of bodycam video recording, of vital importance in the outcome of a possible court case. News media organizations emphasize this. There is other evidence, some in the form of still photos and video recordings of events, of vital importance in helping to shed light on the murder of thousands of people in the United States in a single day. News media organizations do not emphasize this; they bury it or bar it altogether.

Last week, 42-year-old Andrew Brown Jr., a black father of seven, was shot dead in Elizabth City, North Carolina, as sheriff’s deputies tried to serve a warrant for his arrest. The car he had been driving reportedly first came into contact with one of the deputies and then with another, but at the time of the fatal gunshot he reportedly had two hands on the steering wheel and the car was stationary. Injuries to the deputies, if any, were not reported.

This occurred on Wednesday, April 21. At issue today, a week later, is whether a judge would release to the public body cam video of the incident, some of which members of Brown’s family were allowed to see.

An NPR “Morning Edition” segment today, headlined “N.C. Court Considers Release of Bodycam Video, Brown Family Releases Autopsy,” is HERE (scroll down for it).

CNN’s coverage this afternoon, headlined “Andrew Brown shooting: Judge denies media request for videos, but allows family to view reccordings,” is HERE.

This is a national story — one of many like it — and will continue to be. Available video recordings in a number of fatal shootings of blacks by law enforcement personnel have been routinely part of the cases in 2020 this and 2021. Some are decisive in court.

The Elizabeth City incident is sketched here because the FBI and the Department of Justice have withheld considerable evidence from the public about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States. It has been classified for nearly 20 years. When in September 2018 the U.S. Senate resolved unanimously that it should be declassified, this was news nowhere — not in the New York Times, not in the Washington Post, not in the Associated Press, nowhere. HERE is some coverage, though. HERE is later coverage.

What is going on?

— Mark Channing Miller

Here are news from the Biden administration and some information on the same subject that reaches back into the late 19th century.

“Biden recognizes Armenian genocide: Turkish officials criticize statement” was the headline in the Springfield Sunday Republican over an Associated Press report, one of several AP versions, in this morning’s papers. HERE it is on the website of the Florida TV station WESH. 

Just below is an entry in the 2000 edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. (Things in upper case indicate that they have separate entries in the encyclopedia.)

“Armenian massacres  GENOCIDE of Turkish Armenians by the Ottomans under ABDÜLHAMID II in 1894-96 and by the YOUNG TURK government in 1915-16. In 1894, when the Armenians began agitating for territorial autonomy and protesting against high taxes, Turkish troops and Kurdish tribesmen killed thousands. In 1896, hoping to call attention to their plight, Armenian revolutionaries seized the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul. Mobs of Muslim Turks, abetted by elements of the government, killed more than 50,000 Armenians in response. Sporadic killings occurred over the decades. In 1915, in response to the formation of anti-Turk Armenian battalions, the Turkish government deported 1.75 million Armenians south to Syria and Mesopotamia, in the course of which 600,000 Armenians were killed or died of starvation.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comment in the AP story on President Biden’s action is worth highlighting because it applies to other matters as well: “The truth of these heinous crimes has too often been denied, [their] monstrosity minimized. … History teaches us that if we ignore its darkest chapters, we are destined to witness the horrors of the past be repeated.“

The Green Party sent out the paragraphs below last night, the eve of Earth Day, in a fund-raising email. There’s more about the party’s climate change message at https://www.gp.org. — MCM

–   –   –

Would you jump out of a plane with only half of a parachute?

That’s exactly what President Biden is proposing, with his rumored plan for a 50% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 when the climate science tells us we need to go 100% clean, fossil-free, renewable energy by 2030.

Trump was a climate crisis denier. Biden and the Democrats are climate solutions deniers. They’ll both lead us to a catastrophe.

Please donate to the Green Party today, because nothing short of a transformation of government will put our society on track to stop the climate crisis. The Green Party can be that transformation because we don’t take the fossil fuel money that keeps Biden in denial.

Tomorrow is Earth Day and Greens are organizing events across the country, up to May Day! …

No matter where you are, you can tell President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to stop following the fossil fuel money and start following the climate science.

I seen my opportunities and I took ’em. — George Washington Plunkitt (1842-1924)

We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. … We went to Afghanistan because of a horrific attack that happened 20 years ago. … [T]hat cannot explain why we should remain there in 2021. — Joseph Robinette Biden (born 1942)

–   –   –

Word that U.S. and NATO troops should be out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 is sobering and welcome.

Billions of words have been spoken or written about the war in Afghanistan and its causes, many speakers and writers trumpeting or tiptoeing around the lies that launched and maintained it and subsequent wars. Billions are still to come.

“Murky” is one of them.

— Mark Channing Miller

And [Jesus] said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news of all creation.” — Mark 16:15

–   –   –

Months ago, out in Cincinnati, Scott Gunn signed himself up for a month’s worth of commentaries on Biblical scripture from the liturgies of the Episcopal Church. His began on April 1 (Maundy Thursday) in the little quarterly Forward Day by Day, with the words “Everything Jesus does is about love.”

For today, he selected the sentence up top from Mark 16:9-15, 20, and wrote, in part:

“In our churches, we can be overwhelmed by the labors of keeping things running, of merely surviving. We can become slavishly devoted to the maintenance of familiar practices. We worry so much about rocking the boat …” 

Gunn was probably not thinking of 9/11 and its challenges. Read his whole entry for today, the Saturday of Easter Week, HERE, when it becomes available online.

This is primarily a blog about 9/11, or at least it started out that way three Aprils ago.

— Mark Channing Miller

Happy Birthday! to Seymour Hersh. Eighty-four today, according to NPR’s “Morning Edition.” His memoir, Reporter, published in 2018, should be out in paperback and available at libraries or through interlibrary loan.

’Politics and Poker’  A song from the Broadway musical “Fiorello”

Three More Obits: In the Berkshire Eagle short biographies show the diversity of human experiences in the newspaper’s readership area. Each person written about lived here for at least part of his or her life. Each is part of the human comedy (thanks, William Saroyan). Featured one day this week were Brent Thomas Leonesio, Emily Taylor Andrews Leeds, and Phebe Cramer. One can look them up online, but read there their stories may have a different effect than if found the old-fashioned way on page A4 with their grainy stamp-sized black-and-white photos.

‘The Bankers and the Diplomats Are Going in the Army’ A song written and performed by Michael Cooney

(With apologies and thanks to William Hughes Mearns.)

Yesterday while on the mall
I saw what mattered not at all;
it doesn’t matter still — don’t call.
And if you say it does … what gall!

In their monuments of stone,
each storied prez now all alone,
George and Abe and Franklin Dee
could hardly give a fig, you see:
“Nine-El-What?” they seem to say.
(Does Congress feel the same today?)

The Times, The Post, the News Mu-see
Agree, agree, agree, agree:
“There’s not a thing that’s new to see,
so just get lost, and leave us be.”

— Mark Channing Miller

This is a blog primarily about 9/11. What follows below is the Rev. Scott Gunn’s selection of a verse from the Bible for the Tuesday of Easter Week and his commentary on it. A priest in the Episcopal Church and executive director of the Forward Movement, Gunn was probably not thinking of 9/11 and its challenges. — MCM

–   –   –

Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” — Acts 2:37

By Scott Gunn

The Bible is filled with great sermons, and Peter’s in the second chapter of Acts is one of the best. At the end of a very persuasive talk, the crowd is convicted. “What should we do?”

I have been there. Maybe it was a great sermon, an article I read, or a conversation with a wise friend. Like those Israelites, I say to myself, “What should I do?” And then, usually, inertia wins out, and I do nothing. The moment of conviction passes by, and I convince myself the status quo is fine.

What’s different for this crowd in Acts? Throughout the whole book, the Holy Spirit is the center of the show. The crowd listens to and is guided by the power of the Holy Spirit. Too often, we claim the Holy Spirit’s involvement in making us feel better about what we might have done anyway. But when the Spirit’s wind blows, it’s toward something that we could only have done by God’s grace.