Category: government transparency

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Accountability government transparency international affairs

John Kerry, Super-Villain

John Kerry, Kiefer Sutherland, Iran, diplomacy, international affairs

Whistleblowers and unclassified emails inform us that when he was the secretary of state under Obama, John Kerry thwarted arrests of Iranians illegally acting on behalf of the Iranian state.

While in the United States.

According to Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, “whistleblower disclosures” reveal that while the Obama administration was negotiating with Iran to “prevent” it from acquiring nuclear weapons, “then-​Secretary of State John Kerry actively interfered with [the FBI’s executing of arrest warrants] on individuals in the U.S. illegally supporting Iranian efforts … to develop weapons of mass destruction and its ballistic missile program.”

FBI agents were frustrated because, they said in emails, they had to ask field agents “to stand down on a layup arrest … and wait until the U.S. and Iran negotiations resolve themselves.”

At least one of the protected suspects was on a terrorism watch list.

Seriously?

We need John Kerry to play the bad guy in a revival of 24, trying to stop super-​agent Jack Bauer from taking out terrorists because the U.S. is in the middle of shipping pallets of cash to the terrorism-​sponsoring government. A very delicate operation that must be executed with hair-​trigger precision and without antagonizing the terrorism-​sponsoring recipients.

Kerry’s most recent job: Weather Envoy. He retired from it this year. Apparently, tweaking global climate isn’t as easy as he’d thought.

Could have been worse. This dour, long-​faced pillar of pretense, Kerry, almost became President of the United States. 

We must keep reminding ourselves of this.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment government transparency scandal

So Horrible?

government institutions, secrets, conspiracy, UFO, UAP

Talking to Joe Rogan about the JFK assassination,Tucker Carlson argued that Trump’s and Biden’s withholding of information runs counter to American law. “There’s clearly something worth protecting,” he says, and he doesn’t mean the people involved — they’re all dead.

What’s being protected are, presumably, institutions.

According to Judge Andrew Napolitano, Trump told him that “if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn’t have released it either.” According to Roger Stone, Trump explained that what he saw was “so horrible you wouldn’t believe it” … and thus Trump withheld 20 percent of the documents that had been scheduled to be released.

So horrible? Many of us can imagine quite a lot of horror coming from the dark corridors of the federal Leviathan.

But there’s another generational secret that Trump and Biden share, and Tucker mentioned it too: UFOs.

Indeed, he and Rogan started out the podcast in a freewheeling discussion of what our government now calls “the UAP issue,” for “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” But Tucker focused on a “dark” and “spiritual” element to the story, giving little evidence except for the scientist’s name who had contacted him about the study of UFO injuries of military personnel.

Tucker also mentioned strangely behaving objects that traverse the oceans as if water were no matter. A few days earlier, a Yahoo News “Futurism” article explained that “Tim Gallaudet, an oceanographer and former Naval rear admiral who served as the author of a March white paper about so-​called ‘unidentified submerged objects’ or USOs, told Fox News this week that he considers it both ‘scientifically valid’ and critical to national security to study these phenomena.”

A lot of effort has been made in the recent disclosure talk to frame UAPs as potential threats. But what kind of threat? A “spiritual” one — “so horrible”? 

All we really know is that regarding assassinations and mysterious airborne and oceanic objects, the government would prefer to keep us guessing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom government transparency

Less Oversight?

Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan, Audit, spending, taxes

There are long-​standing debates among those who oppose big government. One is whether we should promote every budget cut and any tax cut, or whether we should more-​or-​less carefully support only some cuts — on the grounds that some possible cuts might scuttle future reforms.

This came to mind upon hearing Michigan Governor Gretch Whitmer’s plan to reduce the budget of one of her state’s bureaucracies by 28 percent.

Hooray!

But wait a moment: the department to be cut is the Office of the Auditor General!

Whitmer’s proposal is to take the $30 million budget and bring it down to a lean $21.7 million.

The point of an auditor is to make sure that government does not misuse the money taken from taxpayers, allegedly for the public benefit. Take that away, and what do you have? 

Waste. Corruption — a recipe for it, anyway. Maybe an engraved invitation for it.

Is there any merit to this reduction? Democrats are not known to love budget cuts. 

They say Michigan’s auditor’s office has been “too partisan” — and certainly said things about Democrat programs that don’t make those programs look good!

“If there is ever a place in Lansing where we should rise above petty partisan politics, it should be oversight and ethics,” Rep. Tom Kunse (R‑Clare) said, expressing a perspective I share.

So what’s really going on here? Well, the state is facing a $418 million surplus. That’s a lot of money to play with. What’s the likelihood that the party in charge wants to reduce the Auditor’s Office for any other reason than to reduce scrutiny of how they plan to spend that money?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency ideological culture

Pandemic Politics … or Poltroonery?

Covid, vaccine, government, mandates, freedom

Fear was a major theme — and ploy — during the pandemic. But it’s looking now like the people we have been told to rely upon for our safety are themselves moved by fear. They’re cowards, poltroons.

The Centers for Disease Control wrote an alert in the thick of 2021’s “vaccine” rollout, warning of the dangers of the Moderna and Pfizer jabs.

It was never sent out.

“In the May 25, 2021, email, exclusively obtained by The Epoch Times, a CDC official revealed why some officials were against sending the alert,” explains Zachary Stieber. You see, while an alert to health care professionals using the official Health Area Network system made complete sense, one CDC official gave a clue to her colleagues’ hesitance: “people don’t want to appear alarmist,” you see.

What did we who took the jab risk? Heart inflammation, or myocarditis. The CDC knew this early on.

But did not warn us.

Now, from listening to Dr. John Campbell on YouTube and Rumble, we have learned a lot more (if not in time in 2021) about the myocarditis threat. The takers of the modRNA treatment who are most at risk are those who engage in strenuous exercise soon after inoculation (which explains why the bulk of the afflicted have been boys and young men in the prime of life). Or so I last heard. I am certainly no doctor; I merely rely upon doctors to advise me.

And those doctors, in turn, rely upon official sources of information like the CDC. 

Who did not advise them properly.

Who worry too much about “appearing alarmist” and not enough about relaying the best information.

Poltroons!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency media and media people

Transient Stars

UAP, UFO, conspiracy, cover-up

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, UFOs and “flying saucers” made newspaper headlines, and government officials had contradictory things to say about them. Then, soon after 1952’s summer UFO flyovers of Washington, D.C, the government got into the denial game, and the general tenor of the conversation changed.

The federal government, it seems, had instituted a policy of “cover-​up.”

This has changed in the last few years, after a military investigation into UFOs went public, and as Congress began making public and confidential inquiries.

What do we really know?

Not much.

Still, that startling 1952 UFO wave appears to have received some additional evidence … from an unexpected quarter.

A team of astronomers compared old sky plates from the Palomar Observatory —photographed in the 1950s — to modern digitized pictures of the heavens, searching for “vanishing stars.” Appearing and disappearing stars are a fascinating study, in this research the aim being to detect “instances where a star directly collapses into a black hole.” The scientists found none of these “failed supernova” events. 

But what they found surprised them: “several images where multiple star-​like objects appear in a single snapshot of the sky, never to be seen again.”

They tested many possible explanations for the mysterious data, and then an automated search coughed up a doozy: “The image showed three bright and beautiful objects looking just like stars in a POSS‑I image from the 19th of July 1952 that appeared and vanished within a plate exposure.… The three bright objects seemed as real as Betelgeuse itself.”

These were not single bright dots on photographic plates, but multiple simultaneous dots.

As scientist Beatriz Villarroel writes, “our two most prominent and brightest cases of multiple transients coincided in time with the two weekends of the renowned Washington UFO flyovers.”

One wonders whether later mass-​sighting events, such as the “Belgian Wave” (November 1989 – April 1990) and Arizona’s “Phoenix Lights” (March 13, 1997), might have recorded similar transients above, ready for study. 

Thankfully, we do not need to rely directly upon government agents to do the research.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency national politics & policies

Two Roadblocks, and Their Names

Jeffrey Epstein, UAP, UFO, cover up, Congress

Meandering through social media, a popular meme with several variants runs something like this:

“Hey, this guy says the government believes in UFOs!

“See, nobody cares. Now show us the Epstein client list.”

The gist: the Jeffrey Epstein story is a bigger, more important story than the on 70-​plus years of government control of the UFO story.

Well, we now know precisely why we cannot have either: a few specific politicians are blocking disclosure, one Democrat on the Epstein story and a handful of Republicans on the UFO story.

Hillary Vaughn of Fox News asked Senator Dick Durbin (D‑Ill.) why he — the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee — won’t subpoena Epstein’s flight logs to and from his private Caribbean island wherein sex trafficking with under-​age females and males went on. His response? “I don’t know anything about his flight logs” and “This has never been raised by anyone.”

This is untrue. 

UFO/​UAP transparency, on the other hand, has gone much further than the Epstein — probably because there are fewer politicians implicated in crimes. Yet two major disclosure elements in a recent defense bill have been nixed by Mike Turner (R‑Oh.) and Mike Rogers (R‑Ala.). Journalist Ross Coulthart, who has covered this story best, ascribes this pair’s opposition to disclosure to their respective military-​industrial complex constituencies. And Coulthart adds that Senator Mitch McConnell (R‑Ky.) also had a hand in disclosure suppression.

Both the Epstein and the UFO story reveal a lot about our government, which wants us to know the truth about neither.

And as for the notion that these issues must be played off each other, the proper memed response would be “Why can’t we have both?”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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