Tag: secrecy

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government transparency national politics & policies

Identified?

UFO, UAP, aliens, US government, secrets, technology

The current UFO story is not a Big Nothing, but neither is it a Big Something.

Tucker Carlson addressed it on the first episode (6:43 mark) of Tucker on Twitter, his new show solely broadcast on the social media giant’s platform.

“A former Air Force officer, who worked for years in military intelligence, came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. Government has physical evidence of crashed, non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft,” Tucker explained. “The Pentagon has spent decades studying these other-worldly remains in order to build more technologically-advanced weapons systems. OK. That’s what the former intel officer revealed, and it’s clear he was telling the truth.”

Tucker’s conclusion? “UFOs are actually real and so, apparently, is extraterrestrial life.”

He may have gone a bit overboard. As “skeptic” science writer Michael Shermer notes, there is no real evidence here — at least in The Debrief’s  June 5 story, upon which most of the journalism is based — just very familiar rumors. Nothing whistleblower David Charles Grusch says is new; hundreds of other alleged whistleblowers have been saying similar things for decades.

What’s different? This time one of these whistleblowers has sworn under oath and given testimony to Congress.

Which is not insignificant. Grusch’s testimony also, allegedly, points to where in the Deep State the secrets lay hiding.

While the story hardly proves “UFOs are actually real” and so “is extraterrestrial life,” it suggests that the Government’s contradictory past press releases on the subject may (just may) be provably identified as the lies they’ve long seemed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

The Liars

teacher, education, gender, trans

Talk about proof positive that school officials have a policy of lying to parents about their children!

According to Fox News, Kansas teacher Pamela Ricard contends that “deceiving parents about their children’s pronouns was against her Christian beliefs.”

Yet her bosses demanded this precise deceit.

Officials at Fort Riley Middle School suspended Ricard for referring to a transgender child by his or her legal name and by standard pronouns rather than by his or her preferred name and pronouns. (The Fox News report is coy about the actual sex of the child.) Ricard had also been ordered to use only the legal name and standard pronouns when speaking to the child’s parents — i.e., to conceal the child’s stated preferences.

Parents of any religion, or none, may well dispute the notion that when their kid suggests that he or she is “really” a member of the opposite sex, this profession of sexual faith points in a direction that any supportive adult ought only to encourage and sanction.

Of course, it is precisely the fact that parents may well disagree with school officials about the appropriate response to such intimations that inspires dishonest officials with an ideological-cultural agenda to demand that parents be lied to.

With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, Pamela Ricard won a settlement of $95,000 from the Geary County school district for its treatment of her. After she filed the lawsuit, the district dropped its policy of lying to parents.

At least, so they say.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency international affairs

Transparency with Chinese Characteristics

China, Covid, censorship, secrecy, Wuhan, lab, research, transparency

Chinese government officials are shocked, shocked — no wait, make that “extremely shocked!” — that the World Health Organization (no less) proposes “to further investigate whether the coronavirus emerged from a lab in Wuhan.” 

“We are asking China to be transparent, open and cooperate,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director-general, “especially on the information, raw data that we asked for in the early days of the pandemic.”

But yesterday, at a Beijing news conference, the vice minister of the Chinese National Health Commission, Zeng Yixin, shared his feelings that “this plan revealed a lack of respect for common sense and an arrogant attitude toward science. We can’t possibly accept such a plan for investigating the origins.”

Instead, Zeng suggested searching for “signs of natural transmission . . . and the possibility that the virus may have first spread outside China” . . . or perhaps chasing after wild geese.

“[S]everal Chinese officials asserted that the W.H.O. inquiry got it right the first time,” explained The New York Times, “and that there was no evidence to justify renewed checks of the labs.”

“Renewed”? That supposes that labs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have previously been inspected, forensically, and the personnel interviewed — not to mention a ton of essential evidence on the virus shared and analyzed. None of that has happened.

The joint WHO-China investigation was no such thing. It was a transparent* scam to dismiss the lab-leak theory as “extremely unlikely” without scrutiny. Even the head of the W.H.O. publicly backed away from its own finding, declaring that more investigation was needed.

Only major U.S. media still buy Chinazi gaslighting . . .

. . . or express surprise that the genocidal mobsters running China won’t cooperate in holding themselves accountable. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* No doubt, this marks the absolute zenith of transparency for the Chinese Communist Party.

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art: transparent / floater

ADDITIONAL LINKS

The Man the Media Missed — June 8, 2021

The Worshipful and the Incurious — June 3, 2021

The Sound of Sino-Silence? — March 22, 2021

Now Safe to Blame? — March 8, 2021

Good Relations with Genocide? — November 24, 2020

Soft on China — April 29, 2020

Follow the (Media) Money — April 21, 2020

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government transparency

ET, Send Money

deep state, UFOs, report

Modern UFO lore begins in World War II with the foo fighters, continues with Kenneth Arnold’s infamous June 24, 1947, Mount Rainier flying saucer report, the July 8 “crash” near Roswell, New Mexico (very near where the Enola Gay was deployed), and the “flying saucers over the capital” coverage a little over five years later.

In 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was created, and 1952 gave us the National Security Agency. Coincidence? 

President Harry S. Truman was regularly briefed about UFOs, and at the end of that era his successor warned us of the growth of a “military-industrial complex” completely outside of republican oversight or any democratic check to balance secret power and privilege.

The two issues are linked, UFOs and the Deep State. Many people deny the existence of both, and I understand the former denial — to those who have never seen anything inexplicable and weird in the skies? I’m with you. But the phenomena keep getting reported. And as for the Deep State, whatever its ontic status, its compartmentalized secrecy and not-quite-on-the-books budgeting were established by Congress. What evidence do you need to say it exists? 

Public information? 

The kind, ahem, now prevented by non-disclosure agreements and the layers upon layers of military security?

Last week, the Pentagon gave to Congress its report about UFOs.

Did it amount to anything?

Yes.

Was it the UFO Apocalypse so many had waited for?

No. The military confirmed these sightings are not optical illusions but “physical objects.”*

It is probably what you would expect from a secretive military’s congressional report. Some new admissions, sure, but mainly it was . . . a request for more funding.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Or, as Air Force General Nathan F. Twining put it in September of 1947, “The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious.”

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Put the Public in Public Policy

Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, secrecy, transparency, negotiations

“Negotiations are impossible without trust,” wrote Leon Panetta in a Washington Post op-ed.

What with all his experience, Mr. Panetta has some reason to be trusted on his chosen subject, government shutdowns. The California Democrat spent 16 years in the Congress before joining the Clinton Administration as Director of the Office of Management and Budget and later serving as White House Chief of Staff. He was Obama’s first CIA Director and then Secretary of Defense.

But not every one of the sage’s pronouncements passes muster. 

“Never,” he advised, “negotiate in public.” 

He is of course referring to the hilarious chat President Trump had with two Democratic leaders . .  . and a bland, bored, and blank Vice President Pence.

“The talks to avert a shutdown got off to a terrible start,” Panetta argues, “when the president, during an Oval Office meeting with likely incoming speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), began arguing his position in front of White House reporters. . . . In all the negotiations on the budget that I took part in as both House Budget Committee chairman and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, not one took place in front of the media. Public shouting matches usually guarantee failure.”

The implication? That these previous negotiations were “successful.”

To those with careers ensconced in Washington power, they worked out just splendidly, I’m sure. But the aftermath of these private, secretive agreements on the rest of us? It can be quantified: $21 trillion.

In federal debt. 

We do not need more of that “success.”

Let’s put the public back in public policy decisions.  “It’s called transparency,” President Trump said. 

Yes. 

More of that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, secrecy, transparency, negotiations

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Secrecy, Conspiracy, and the Sauds

secrets, government, Saudi, 911, conspiracy, illustration

The U. S. cleaves to some bizarre security standards. That is, about secrecy. Critics have been complaining for years about how “liberal” the federal government is in classifying information as secret. Or, put another way, how stingy the government is in providing us with information.

Not liberal at all.

This problem inhabits every nook and cranny of official Washington. But it’s most obvious in the case of 2002’s 9/11 report, from which 28 pages were removed. For reasons of state secrets. And that, as the BBC related this weekend, is the likely cause of much suspicion against Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia? Yes. The country whose sands were walked upon by Mohammad, the Prophet, is also the country that gave birth to 15 of the 18 terrorist skyjackers, as well as spreading the Wahabist spin on jihad throughout the Islamic world.

So, by withholding portions of the report from the public, the government fed the flame of conjecture. And with it, the belief in a Saud conspiracy and a Bush and Obama cover-up.

The withholding of information does not give us a univocal perspective. We don’t know what is being kept from our eyes and ears. So when I read the BBC report, which stated that the “probable publication” of the previously classified parts “will clear Saudi Arabia of any responsibility, CIA chief John Brennan has said,” I get suspicious.

Good, if true. But the timing of this Brennan opinion, on the weekend of the Orlando massacre?

Stinks of spin and deflection by the government, against us . . . who wonder, not without reason, about “conspiracies.”

Should we trust the newly de-classified segments?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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secrets, government, Saudi, 911, conspiracy, illustration