An ongoing
attempt to come to terms with the realities
behind the events of 9/11
Where The Merinos Stand:
An
Aperiodic Update
April 15, 2011
A long time has
passed since the update below, and in the interim I have learned that
my true medical diagnosis is something quite different from what I had thought. Despite the best efforts of the Stanford
Neurology Department about two years ago, their somewhat tentative diagnosis
of a variant form of ALS has proved to be mistaken. To be fair, unusual
diseases often take a long time to declare themselves, and in the early stages
similar symptoms may be signs of widely different diseases.
Thanks to a
perceptive family dentist and a tongue biopsy I finally learned that I
actually have a condition called amyloidosis, a rare disease that I had never
seen in 30 years of Family Practice. It involves deposition of an
amorphous protein material in various tissues of the body, including tongue,
kidneys and heart muscle. It turns out that amyloid also has an affinity
for myelin, the lipid based sheath that acts as insulation on the long axons
of nerve cells, and triggers a reaction that destroys the neuron.
All of the
peculiar neurologic symptoms that I had been experiencing for several years,
as well as the muscle wasting I experienced came from this attack by the
amyloid protein on the myelin of various nerves. Loss of sensory nerves
had caused the hand numbness, and loss of the motor nerves led to "denervation
atrophy," a process whereby muscles no longer getting signals from a motor
nerve melt away to nothing but a wisp of fibrous tissue. Denervation
atrophy is also the process seen in ALS, and the distribution of the atrophy
(proximal muscles, mostly hip and shoulders) was also consistent with ALS.
Amyloidosis is
really an end process, not a disease per se, and can be caused by a number of
underlying diseases that all lead to production of large amounts of the
amyloid protein, such as chronic infections and autoimmune disease.
As it turns out in my case I am one of about 10% of all those with amyloidosis
in whom it is caused by Multiple Myeloma, a malignant disease involving
abnormal plasma cells in the bone marrow. Plasma cells are the part of
the immune system that make antibodies to fight infection, cranking up quickly
to make lots of the specific antibody needed to fight current infection.
Those bumps you feel in your neck with colds and flu are lymph nodes swollen
with lots of plasma cells, and shrink up again as the infection clears and the
plasma cells shut down.
In Multiple
Myeloma a renegade clone of plasma cells begins growing uncontrollably,
ignoring the normal signals to shut off, and make large amounts of an
incomplete immunoglobulin molecule - in my case something called the kappa
light chain. These build up in the blood and deposit in various tissues,
where they undergo re-folding into the amyloid protein.
This is
relatively good news to the extent that MM, despite being technically a
malignant process, tends to follow a more gradual course than ALS, and in some
cases may respond to chemotherapy. The defective plasma cells do not
grow especially rapidly, and in my case are only taking up a small amount of
the bone marrow space and have not metastasized to bone. Of course they
do continue to make kappa light chains, so accumulation of amyloid may
continue over time, and there is no way to undo the damage done to the nerves
and muscles.
Despite this my
overall condition has shown some gradual improvement, I am continuing to do
office-based medicine part time, and have finally decided to return to
updating this web site. My thanks and best wishes to those of you who
have offered me encouragement over the years. I will try to write more
over the next few weeks, both on my own struggles and on the current state of
"9-11 Truth" and my thoughts on recent developments in this ongoing and still
profoundly unresolved subject.
--JK
*************
Update and
Apologia:
A Personal Note
6/07/2009
For those of you who have
followed this website and encouraged my
efforts in the past, I would like to apologize for my unexplained neglect
of the Café over the past two years. This does not reflect any loss
of interest, but unfortunately results from a medical problem that
has overtaken me, and my efforts to keep my small medical office open
despite these problems. This condition
was ultimately diagnosed as an atypical form of ALS, a rare disease that
involves the loss of motor neurons, which in turn leads to denervation
atrophy of the muscles.
My
symptoms began insidiously with night sweats and profound fatigue perhaps
as much as seven years ago, well before my talk in New York in 2004, along
with hand numbness that I first took to be carpal tunnel syndrome.
At this point (2002-2005) I was doing a lot of keyboarding in and blamed
the hand problems on overuse. In early 2006 I had arthroscopic
carpal tunnel releases on both wrists, and actually improved for about a
year before abruptly worsening again.
By late 2007 I was getting serious
muscle weakness in the legs, and lost much of the strength and sensation
in my hands. Throughout this time I was still working full time in
the office with my wife Patti, continuing to do non-hospital primary care. She
was an RN when I met her in the late 1980s, when we both worked in the ER
at Visalia Community Hospital, and she completed PA (Physician Assistant)
school a few years ago, after working in the office as nurse/ office
manager since I started my solo practice in Tulare in 1997. Since graduation she has worked as a in
the practice as a full time practitioner, and without her help it would
not have survived my recent difficulties.
By mid 2008 I
had dislocated a shoulder and hip because of muscle weakness, and got two muscle tears with only
minimal trauma, and finally decided to quit working completely in August.
What has happened since then is a long and complex story that I
will not try to explain in detail at this point, except to say that I have found at least some
of the answers to the origins of my disorder, and have been able to alter
the course of the degenerative process enough that it has actually
stabilized and begun a gradual trend of improvement.
In fact there
has been enough improvement that I
have been able to return to the office part time, and I have begun to be optimistic
that the hand numbness is also improving and may eventually disappear.
To be explicit about the measures that seem to have helped (without for
now going into all the implications of these), they include stopping Lipitor,
which I had been taking for several years and which
seems to
cause ALS in susceptible people, along with taking a number of
supplements and herbs to improve mitochondrial function (one of the things
that is damaged by statin drugs like Lipitor) and encourage nerve and
membrane repair.
More recently
I also became aware of the role of a number of "stealth pathogens" in
causing neurodegenerative diseases like ALS and MS, as well as various
autoimmune and other degenerative disorders. These pathogens include species of mycoplasma, the Lyme
disease organism (Borrelia burgdorferi, a spirochete not unlike the
syphilis organism, and likewise well adapted to attacking the nervous
system - in its time syphilis was called the great imitator), as well as
certain strains of viruses. This gets into some very deep waters
very quickly, as it appears certain that stains of mycoplasma (e.g. M.
frementans) at large in the population have been weaponized in biowarfare labs and were a major
contributor to Gulf War Syndrome.
In viewconsideration of
this, and having seen unidentified bacterial accretions in my blood under
live cell microscopy, I have also started on immune support and
antibacterial/antiviral herbs, including an
Amazon Rainforest formula developed specifically for mycoplasma
developed by Leslie Taylor and used by
Garth
Nicolson in some of his protocols. Since I began using these a
little over a month ago there has been a noticeable improvement in the
stiffness and numbness in my hands, as well as in mental clarity and
physical stamina. Treatment has to continue for months, as
mycoplasma is good at hiding deep in tissues, but early results look
encouraging and the regimen hasn't caused any problems for me so far.
"Testifying before the 9/11 Commission
General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the
commission in response to NORAD’s mission, "I can't answer the hypothetical.
It's more - it's the way that we were directed to posture, looking
outward."1 This is utterly false. As we will see below NORAD, since its
inception, was tasked to monitor and intercept aircraft flying over American
and Canadian air space seven days a week, 24 hours a day." (more)
Kamal S. Obeid, structural engineer, with a masters
degree in Engineering from UC Berkeley, of Fremont, California,
says:
"Photos of the steel, evidence about how the
buildings collapsed, the unexplainable collapse of WTC 7, evidence of
thermite in the debris as well as several other red flags, are quite
troubling indications of well planned and controlled demolition"
Ronald H. Brookman, structural engineer, with a
masters degree in Engineering from UC Davis, of Novato California,
writes:
"Why would all 110 stories drop straight down to
the ground in about 10 seconds, pulverizing the contents into dust and ash
- twice. Why would all 47 stories of WTC 7 fall straight down to the
ground in about seven seconds the same day? It was not struck by any
aircraft or engulfed in any fire. An independent investigation is
justified for all three collapses including the surviving steel samples
and the composition of the dust."
Is a proper
burial for World Trade Center victims a justice issue? Diane Horning's vigil
for the conscience of America. by Rose Marie Berger
Excerpt:
The proper burial
of the dead has been called “the last office of humanity.” The 15th-century
poet-philosopher
Giambattista Vico identified it as among the three characteristics,
along with religion and marriage, of a civilized society. “[From] these
three institutions are the origin of all civilizations and therefore they
must be most devoutly guarded by all,” Vico wrote, “so that the world should
not again become a bestial wilderness.”
IN THE DAYS
FOLLOWING the collapse of the Twin Towers,
firefighters and others began the painstaking task of recovering the
remains of their lost comrades and hundreds of civilians using a “hand and
shovel” digging method. To find and return remains to family members for
proper burial was a matter of honor, dignity, and respect for the dead. But
political expediency took precedence over basic human decency. “[Then-mayor
Rudy] Giuliani wanted to make sure that the Trade Towers were at ground
level before he left office,” Kurt Horning told me, “which is why they went
to the ‘scoop and dump’ method once they recovered the gold.”
According to The London Times, a billion dollar cache of gold
and other precious metals had been buried beneath the Trade Center. “The
Comex metals trading division of the New York Mercantile Exchange kept 3,800
gold bars … worth more than $100 million” in vaults in the basement of one
of the WTC buildings, reported the Times. Comex also held almost
$220 million worth of other companies’ gold and more than $430 million worth
of silver.
On Oct. 30, 2001,
workers at Ground Zero unearthed the cache. With more than 100 heavily armed
federal agents standing guard, police and firefighters were redeployed from
recovery efforts to load up armored trucks with the treasure. Within hours
of finding the gold, Giuliani stopped the recovery effort and pulled workers
off the pile.
The “scoop and
dump” method was for clearing the site, not recovering the dead. Earthmovers
and steam shovels scooped up debris at Ground Zero and dumped it in trucks
that took it to barges. It was floated up the Arthur Kill tidal strait and
then trucked to the Fresh Kills Landfill to be sifted for remains and
personal effects. According to the sworn testimony of workers there, whole
bodies were still in the wreckage. Taylor Recycling’s site supervisor for
the Fresh Kills sifting job, Eric Beck, testified in conjunction with a law
suit the World Trade Center Families have brought against the city of New
York, “I vividly remember our finding a man’s full chest and the full body
of a man still dressed in a suit.” Beck also testified that Department of
Sanitation workers were told to take the fines (the sifted, screened, and
washed soil)—in effect the cremated remains of WTC victims—and use them to
pave roads and fill in pot holes.
Breathless Audacity:
How the White House Betrayed the Real Heroes of 911 by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber The largest
study yet of lung problems among 9/11 rescue workers shows bad
news. "Nearly 70 percent of the rescue and cleanup workers who
toiled in the dust and fumes at ground zero have had trouble
breathing, and many will probably be sick for the rest of their
lives," reports Amy Westfeldt. The study, conducted by the Mount
Sinai Medical Center, monitored the health of nearly 16,000 ground
zero workers. The volunteers who dug through the rubble in search of
survivors inhaled dust laden with asbestos, pulverized concrete,
mercury and toxins that will leave many of them chronically sick for
the rest of their lives.
Remains
of 9/11 victims 'to spend eternity'
in city rubbish dump
By Charles Laurence in New York
Telegraph 10/10/2004
"The remains of hundreds of victims
of the September 11 attacks are to be permanently buried in the world's
largest rubbish dump, to the consternation of their grieving relatives.
In the aftermath of 9/11, more than half a million tons of dust and ashes from
the Twin Towers were taken to the sprawling Fresh Kills landfill site on
Staten Island.
"More than 100 years' worth of refuse from New York
City had accumulated at the dump before it was finally closed just six
months before the attacks. The rubble from the World Trade Center ended up
covering some 48 acres.
"Relatives were assured that ashes would be
returned after they were sorted, but city authorities have since balked at
the estimated $450 million cost of transferring them again. Instead they
have promised to lay a 2,200-acre park on top of the dump, whose rotting
contents smell strongly of methane, and to erect a memorial to the
victims."
You'll have to
excuse the obscure merino joke, but one of the formative experiences of my
early teen years growing up just outside of Boston was running into a copy
of the Harvard Lampoon with a strange series of cartoons of stylized sheep
on one of my expeditions to Cambridge. This was in the early 1960s
when most of the sidewalks in Cambridge were still made of brick, and almost
no building in town was taller than three stories. The book stores and
magazine stands of Harvard Square were my refuge from the banal world of
suburban high school life, and the gateways to a mysterious world of big
ideas and countercultural mysteries. My discovery of "See the Merinos"
was something of a revelation: here was the product of a profoundly twisted
but irresistible sense of humor that offered hope that my own sensibility
was not just a one-off outlier of the human species.
Much later,
through the magic trivial fact finding powers of the internet I discovered
that these cartoons were done by Christopher Cerf and Michael Firth,
and later printed in Cerf's book
The
World's Largest Cheese, published in 1968. I recently found a used
copy that had been discarded by the
Russell Kansas Public Library (a fate shared by another of my favorite
books, Riddley Walker). Christopher Cerf was the son of Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of
Random House, and worked there as a senior editor from 1963-70. He
later became better known for his songwriting contributions to Sesame Street
and writings for the National Lampoon, which he helped to found in 1970.
The merino
cycle opened with a
dictionary definition of merino: "A hardy gregarious breed of
fine-wooled white sheep, originating in Spain..." followed by a series
of cartoons based on variations of the phrase "See the merino standing
there, with his long shaggy hair."
Things get
progressively sillier as the phrase and accompanying drawings morph through
a series of homonyms of the original couplet, starting innocently enough
with 'hair' going from the pleural to the
singular. Then 'hair' becomes
'Eire' as in Ireland, and then
'air'
as in a piece of music, and later to a bearded
old
dude with a hay fork. The reference in the title to the left is to
a variation where the words 'merino standing' refers to a piece of paper
marked
"How
the Merinos Stand," the paper itself having the necessary shaggy hair.
There's more
of course, including the incomparable
thumber Enos and a rendering of Merino George and his son
George Jr., but in the interest of fair use I will leave the rest to
those brave enough to seek out their own copy of The World's Biggest Cheese.
I suggest starting with the discard bin of your local public library, where
you might also be able to pick up a copy of Russell Hoban's remarkable book
Riddley Walker,
another testimonial to the quirky but unbounded creativity of the human
mind, for free or cheap.
********************
My 9/11/2004 NYC Talk on Collapse Forensics
A re-posting on
YouTube of a talk that I gave in New York City on 9/11/2004 at a conference
called
"9/11, Confronting the Evidence." The previous most-visited copy of
this talk on YouTube has been taken down, so I am re-posting the copy I
have. Since it runs ~14 minutes I have clipped it at 10 minutes and
will upload the rest of it as a separate video.
A former Air Force medic, Kevin
McPadden was on station just north of WTC-7 up to the time of the collapse,
and actually heard the demolition countdown and explosions as the building
started to fall.
Later in the segment Richard Gage discusses the WTC-7 and twin tower collapses
as controlled demolitions.
This clip is from "9-11
Truth Rising," a documentary about the 9-11 truth movement.
A more detailed interview with him is also
on YouTube
here.
********************
A
Very Bad Day In Southern Manhattan:
Why Merrill Lynch Employee David Long Thinks
9/11 Was An Inside Job
On May 8, 2009, members of Truth Action Ottawa interviewed Mr. David Long,
who was in downtown Manhattan the morning of September 11, 2001. Mr.
Long recounts everything he saw and heard that morning, including multiple
streams of molten metal pouring from the buildings before they fell, and the
sounds of multiple explosions as the buildings came down.
"One of the greatest mysteries of September 11, 2001 is the collapse of
the Twin Towers. Claims that explosions contributed to the collapses were
made on 9/11 and have persisted, but studies supportive of the U.S.
government’s account of events have ignored or denied these claims. A great
deal is at stake in this debate. If explosions were critical to the
collapses, the official al Qaeda narrative may need to be radically altered
or abandoned altogether.
"In January, 2006 an article by David Ray Griffin appeared entitled,
"Explosive Testimony: Revelations about the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral
Histories." Drawing on a collection of oral histories from the New York Fire
Department (FDNY), Griffin argued the case for controlled demolition of the
towers. I found myself intrigued by the data he had used and impressed by
his method, but I decided there was room for further research.
I wanted answers to two questions:
(1) Are the roughly 31 witnesses to explosions quoted by Griffin the
total of all witnesses to explosions in these sources, or are there others
he does not mention?
(2) Are there witnesses in these sources whose testimony supports the
non-explosive collapse of the Towers—the U.S. government’s perspective?
"I decided to read the primary sources in order to answer these
questions. This paper gives the results of my research. I am interested, in
this paper, in direct perception and immediate interpretation. I want to
know what witnesses saw, heard and thought on 9/11 at the scene of the
crime.
"Although I shall discuss briefly the fact that some witnesses later
changed their minds about what they had experienced, this is not my central
focus. I do not claim to have proven that the Towers were brought down with
explosives, but I believe the eyewitness testimony assembled and discussed
here strengthens the argument that explosions were critical to the
collapses."
World Financial Center buildings stand
before the smoldering WTC site in this view from the west, just across
the Hudson River. The
memorial to
the
Katyn Forest Massacre in
the foreground sits at Montgomery Street at Exchange Place in Jersey
City, New Jersey.
******************
"The liberty of a democracy is not
safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it
becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence,
is Fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any
controlling private power." -
FDR
******************
9/11
Bombshell:
WTC7 Security Official Details Explosions Inside Building
Says bombs were going off
in 7 before either tower collapsed
Excerpt from interview on the Alex Jones Show:
[...]We can reveal that the
individual concerned was asked to report to building seven with a city
official after the first attack on the North tower but before the second
plane hit the South Tower and before their eventual collapse, in order to
provide the official with access to different floors of the building.
The city official he was escorting
was attempting to reach Rudy Guiliani, who he had determined was inside
building 7 at that time. According to Avery and Burmas this official now
works for Guiliani partners.
The individual was also asked to
provide access to the Office Of Emergency Management on the 23rd floor of
the building, this was the so called "bunker" that was built inside WTC7 on
the orders of Rudy Guiliani.
When he got there he found the office
evacuated and after making some calls was told to leave immediately.
It was at this point that he
witnessed a bomb going off inside the building:
"We subsequently went to the
stairwell and were going down the stairs, when we reached the sixth floor,
the landing that we were standing on gave way, there was an explosion and
the landing gave way. I was left there hanging, I had to climb back up and
now had to walk back up to the eighth floor. After getting to the eighth
floor everything was dark."
The individual in a second clip
detailed hearing further explosions and then described what he saw when he
got down to the lobby:
"It was totally destroyed, it
looked like King Kong had been through it and stepped on it and it was so
destroyed I didn't know where I was. It was so destroyed that had to take me
out through a hole in the wall, a makeshift hole I believe the fire
department made to get me out."
He was then told by firefighters to
get twenty blocks away from the area because explosions were going off all
over the World Trade Center complex.
Excerpt:
At the time of the floor tests, I worked for Underwriters Laboratories (UL). I
was very interested in the progress of these tests, having already asked
some sensitive questions. My interest began when UL's CEO, Loring Knoblauch,
a very experienced executive with a law degree from Harvard, surprised us at
the company's South Bend location, just a few weeks after 9/11, by saying
that UL had certified the steel used in the WTC buildings. Knoblauch told us
that we should all be proud that the buildings had stood for so long under
such intense conditions. In retrospect it is clear that all of us, including
Knoblauch, were ignorant of many important facts surrounding 9/11 and did
not, therefore, see his statements as particularly important.
Over the next two years, however, I learned more about the issues, like
the unprecedented destruction of the steel evidence and the fact that no
tall steel-frame buildings have ever collapsed due to fire. And I saw video
of the owner of the buildings, stating publicly that he and the fire
department made the decision to "pull"---that is, to demolish---WTC7 that
day,16
even though demolition requires many weeks of planning and preparation.
Perhaps most compelling for me were the words of a genuine expert on the
WTC. This was John Skilling, the structural engineer responsible for
designing the towers.17 (The NOVA video, incidentally, gave this
credit to Leslie Robertson. But Robertson, who never claimed to have
originated the design, was only a junior member of the firm [Worthington,
Skilling, Helle and Jackson], and Skilling was known at the time to be the
engineer in charge.) In 1993, five years before his death, Skilling said
that he had performed an analysis on jet plane crashes and the ensuing fires
and that "the building structure would still be there."
WTC
FAMILIES FOR PROPER BURIAL 
