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Tag: journalism

RFO Newsmax Has Huge Stock Price Increase after IPO

David Martin

The “IPO” abbreviation here is the familiar one, “initial public offering,” referring to the first sale of stock to the public by a company.  “RFO” is one of our own coinage, meaning “rival fake opposition.”  Newsmax made its stock available to the public for the first time just last Friday, and it has taken off like a rocket. When it comes to fake opposition to the long-dominant liberal mainstream media, it might be something of an exaggeration at this point to call Newsmax a rival to the big one, which is Fox News.  I know that I find Newsmax quite boring and hard to watch compared to Fox, and the numbers at Adweek, though a bit difficult to decipher, tell…

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Raymond Aron on Leftists

David Martin

Raymond Aron in The Opium of the Intellectuals: An honest and intelligent person can never become a leftist. An honest leftist is bad-headed, and a smart leftist is dishonest. If you don’t know the contradictory essence of socialism, you’re stupid, and if you know and follow it, you’re a liar.             Null Set II Honest, intelligent, and a leftist, You know what’s occurred to me? Such is the nature of socialism, It’s impossible to be all three. This poem is my update of “Null Set,” which I posted in June of 1998:                 Null Set Decent, intelligent, and a journalist, You know what’s occurred to me? In what…

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Checking Microsoft Copilot on Thomas Merton’s Death

David Martin

Here is how Wikipedia describes Microsoft Copilot in its opening paragraph: Microsoft Copilot is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Microsoft. Based on the GPT-4 series of large language models, it was launched in 2023 as Microsoft’s primary replacement for the discontinued Cortana. I had never even heard of Cortana, so after an email correspondent had sent me a snippet of his experience using Copilot to inquire about the May 22, 1949, death of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, I decided to give it a spin on another death mystery that I happen to know a thing or two about, that of the famous Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, who, according to popular lore, died of accidental electrocution by a…

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The Ballad of Patrick Knowlton

David Martin

Headline: Witness in [Vince] Foster death loses conspiracy appeal Washington Times, January 9, 2001, p. A7 Before he’d arrived at the end of the line A little publicity would have been fine, Shedding some light and putting some heat Upon all those justices’ honorable feet. Patrick Knowlton, The key to the Foster case. Patrick Knowlton, The man the press erased. But they wait till the court in their wisdom refuse To give him a hearing to bring us the news. It’s a story, alas, that is getting quite old; A citizen’s wronged; then he’s out in the cold, And once it’s too late, the public is told. Patrick Knowlton, The key to the Foster case. Patrick Knowlton, The man the…

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Deep Roots of the Current Gaza Slaughter

David Martin

In our previous article about the napalming of refugees by the Israelis during the Six Day War, we quoted extensively from the 1971 book by the Canadian A.C. Forrest, The unHoly Land.  That is also the primary source for this article. We must remember that the residents of the Gaza Strip are almost all the descendants of the people who were driven from their homes and their land in Palestine by the genocidal terror tactics of the colonizing, primarily European-origin Zionists in 1948 in the wake of the patently unfair UN partition of Palestine.  We have been sold on the notion that this awarding of a majority chunk of Palestine to these Jewish refugees was a sort of payback for…

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CIA Finally Pulling the Plug on Biden

David Martin

According to Fox News’s Jesse Watters, the signal to Traitor Joe Biden could hardly have been clearer: Make no mistake: Ignatius’ column is more than a suggestion- it’s a marching order. When American intelligence wants to put out a hit, they feed it to David Ignatius and today, Ignatius pulled the pin on Joe Biden’s 2024 run. He’s turning Washington’s whispers into a rallying cry. The American intelligence community has to tie up their loose ends. Even the media is falling in line: admitting the Democratic party is a dishonest monolith. A mob that can’t function when it’s fractured. The Biden-Kamala ticket is being cancelled in its entirety and the intelligence community is making a calculation. He’s talking about Ignatius’…

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Lawrence of Arabia and Yevgeny Prigrozhin

David Martin

Most people find it quite easy to believe that the airplane crash that killed Yevgeny Prigrozhin, the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, who had led a mutiny against the Russian government, was no simple accident.  In fact, word has leaked from U.S. intelligence that an intentional explosion brought the airplane down and that President Vladimir Putin was behind it. The CIA would have some familiarity with such methods.  The contrived “accident” is right there in their assassination manual as an expedient form of secret assassination, allowing the perpetrator to deny responsibility for something deemed not to be a murder at all and attracting little attention.   An airplane crash is not on their list of contrived accidents, but it takes…

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Propaganda Press

David Martin

To the tune of “Rock N Roll Train” Keyboard warriors Big time liars Selling us a fantasy Loaded up with treachery Throw it out, pitch it Believable they’re not Yes, they’re adding to our rot Shout it out, “Screw it” Strike while irons are hot We’re tired of fantasy Seeing through treachery Propaganda press (Serving us a poison brew) Propaganda press (Serving us a poison brew) Propaganda press (Serving us a poison brew) Propaganda press (Serving us a poison brew) One hard pounded drum La créme de la scum No shame in their perfidy Stooges for the Agency Shake ‘em, drop ‘em Believable they’re not We ought to make it for them hot See the light, tune ‘em out Come…

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About those White House Surveillance Cameras

David Martin

We’re hearing a lot these days about all those surveillance cameras at the White House after the discovery of that small bag of cocaine and the 11-day “investigation” to determine who left it there that came up empty.  Here is Miranda Devine in her skeptical July 16 article in the New York Post: Even more astonishing [than the supposed absence of fingerprints on the plastic bag] is that, in a complex bristling with security cameras, the Secret Service said no surveillance video footage exists because the baggie was located in a “blind spot.” But where, on the day of his death, July 20, 1993, were all those security cameras in the early afternoon when Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W.…

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The Most Under-Reported Big News Story

David Martin

It’s definitely Tara Reade’s defection.  One has to be a real news hound even to know that Joe Biden’s accuser has taken refuge in Russia. This looks like a very rational decision on Reade’s part to me.  The very light reporting given to her allegations all along was a very bad sign for her, suggesting that she would never get any protection from our nation’s molders of public opinion.  One could imagine reading about her unfortunate “suicide” almost any day.  Had Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the “DC Madam,” demonstrated Reade’s prudence, she would, in all likelihood, be alive and well today. While on the subject of underreported defections to Russia, we should not forget about John Mark Dougan, who used to have a Wikipedia page.…

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Did Thomas Merton Have a Love Child?

David Martin

The late writer and peace activist, Jim Forest, was a good friend and regular correspondent with the notable Catholic spiritual and political leader, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.  Merton, in fact, dedicated his 1968 book, Faith and Violence, to the Jesuit priest and anti-Vietnam War activist, Phil Berrigan, and to his fellow activist, Forest. Forest’s 2008 book, Living with Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton, is, for the most part, an excellent introduction to the life and works of Merton.  It is a revised and expanded version of the book with the same title published in 1991, which was itself an expansion upon the much smaller Thomas Merton: A Pictorial Biography published in 1979.  The 2008 incarnation continues to be…

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Getting a Grip on Thomas Merton’s Murder

David Martin

Null Set Decent, intelligent, and a journalist, You know what’s occurred to me? In what has become of America, It’s impossible to be all three. It’s a rare thing for a book to receive a major review almost five years after its publication, but that, in effect, is what happened on the evening of Tuesday, February  14, 2023.  The book in question is the one written by Hugh Turley and me entitled The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation.  The book was published on March 7, 2018, which happened to be the 50thanniversary year of the mysterious death of the very influential antiwar Catholic monk in Thailand, which was virtually in the heart of the U.S. military’s Vietnam War theater…

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Black Like Whom? Mystery Man, John Howard Griffin

David Martin

In our 2018 book, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, we identified John Howard Griffin as one of four key people responsible for cementing in the public mind the belief that the great Catholic monk and public intellectual, Thomas Merton, had died from accidental electrocution.  The other three were Merton’s abbot at the Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey, Flavian Burns, Merton’s secretary there, Brother Patrick Hart, and Merton’s authorized biographer, Michael Mott.  For the recently published Thomas Merton’s Betrayers: The Case against Abbot James Fox and Author John Howard Griffin, we have delved more deeply into Griffin’s background. The Texas-born journalist and author John Howard Griffin, is known almost exclusively for his 1961 book, Black Like Me.  It is…

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The Thomas Merton Autopsy that Wasn’t

David Martin

Did the prominent monk, writer, social critic, and opponent of the American role in the Vietnam War, Thomas Merton, strangely succumb to a faulty fan while attending a monastic conference in Bangkok, Thailand?  That’s what Associated Press reporter, John T. Wheeler, reported with a dateline of Bangkok on the day of the death, December 10, 1968.  One can read that same characterization of the event even today on the web site of Merton’s home Abbey of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky. Thailand was in the thick of the Vietnam War theater of operations at the time.  Some 80% of the air attacks on North Vietnam and virtually all of those on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos originated there.  America’s…

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We Pulled the Plug on the Shah

David Martin

When I first wrote on this subject seven years ago, the title was in the form of a question, “Did We Pull the Plug on the Shah?”  With the help of a fairly recent but very obscure book by the American expatriate living in England, Arlene Lois Johnson, The Shah of Iran: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi: Victim of His Times I have accumulated enough additional information to write the title of this brief essay as a declarative statement.  The book was published in the United Kingdom by News Source, Incorporated.  No date is provided, but Johnson tells me that it came out in 2018.  The book is apparently not available on Amazon, and I couldn’t get it to come up with…

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Mark Middleton, Meet Daniel Best

David Martin

I posted the first version of what would expand into the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression on March 7, 1998.  There were 13 originally, expanding in stages to 17 by the end of 1999, where it has stayed.  No changes were made in the original entries. The choice of “Dummy up” for the first technique is looking better with every year that passes, despite what would appear to be much greater difficulty than before in keeping a lid on important information, what with the numerous ways that one can be informed these days.  It’s beginning to look as though, similar to George Orwell’s 1984, what I wrote as a description is being taken more and more as a prescription. Take…

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Video on 9/11 Removed from YouTube as “Hate Speech”

David Martin

If for some reason you should find yourself at the Internet site with this URL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ7ojSe-wqg&t=21s, what you will find there is not a YouTube video, but a black rectangle bearing this message in white, in the manner of chalk on a blackboard: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech.  Learn more about combating hate speech in your country.”  Below that, in purple, is a “Learn more” click-on. Doing that, you get: Hate speech is not allowed on YouTube. We remove content promoting    violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on any of the following attributes: Age Caste Disability Ethnicity Gender Identity and Expression Nationality Race Immigration Status Religion Sex/Gender Sexual Orientation Victims…

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American Press Beating Familiar War Drums

David Martin

We didn’t have to look far to find the opening quote for this article.  It was right there on my AOL News.  Check it out: They are a distinct minority in their own party and, for that matter, their country: Republican holdouts amid an ever-widening consensus that Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine poses a mortal threat to American interests. A far right wing of the Republican Party tightly bound to former President Donald Trump is fighting to push the GOP toward the “America First” isolationism that underpinned his 2016 presidential bid. For the first time since Trump’s rise, his party is pushing back. These are the first three paragraphs for a pro-war-participation propaganda piece that AOL has picked up from…

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Important Assassination Movie Quashed

David Martin

Sometimes, not all “accidents” are accidental. (statement on the screen before the opening credits) Released for public viewing in October of 2021 after having been delayed because of the pandemic, the movie had already garnered 28 awards and seven additional nominations.  A 1962 movie with a similar title about the same person, Lawrence of Arabia, is one of the best known and popular of all time.  This one, Lawrence: After Arabia, deals not with T.E. Lawrence’s heroic exploits during World War I, but with his very suspicious death, supposedly in a motorcycle accident, in May of 1935 on a rural dirt road near his home in Dorset in England’s southwest corner.  Lawrence was just 46 years old. Just as Oliver…

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“John Lennon’s” Greatest Hit

David Martin

There was some excitement in my friend’s voice.  He had just stumbled upon what he described as a really extraordinary piece of rock music.  Even more interesting, it had been up on YouTube since November of 2019 and it had had only a little more than 1,400 views, which probably means that fewer than 1,000 people had listened to it, because many of those views had to be by people coming back for more.  The song is called “Don’t Believe,” and it’s rather deeply buried away as the tenth of eleven songs on an album called “Listen to the Picture” produced in 2010 by a band called Abracadabra.[1] The songs are ostensibly taken from the soundtrack of an obscure little…

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