Category: government transparency

Categories
government transparency national politics & policies

Gnashing of Teeth

UFO, disclosure, UAP

Congressman Tim Burchett (R‑Tenn) “doesn’t trust the Pentagon; never have.” But he does put some hope in a Trump presidency. 

“I’m convinced that if he’s elected, there’ll be disclosure.”

He’s not talking about about JFK assassination disclosure — not his bailiwick.

He’s talking about UFOs — or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, as they are now called.

Burchett thinks Trump will be our Disclosure President.

UFO enthusiasts shouldn’t get their hopes up. Trump is not the first president to have been touted as a UFO truth-teller. 

Jimmy Carter infamously admitted that he saw a UFO once, and had hoped to bring transparency to the Pentagon on the subject. The lore about how this fizzled is … odd. 

William Jefferson Clinton went in to office hoping to get to the bottom of two mysteries, UFOs and the JFK assassination. He admitted he got nowhere. 

Hillary Clinton promised to disclose as much as she could about UFOs to the American people — her right-​hand man was John Podesta, a well-​known UFO disclosure advocate — just so long as the information did not jeopardize national security.

A big proviso, that.

Anyway, Hillary didn’t get elected, and the hoped-​for disclosure … started anyway. A workaround spearheaded by Luis Elizondo, a Deep State man from way back, put UFOs back in the headlines in 2017, and we’ve been talking about them ever since.

But Elizondo’s intel background screams “psy-​op” to some people, and it crosses most folks’ minds that the slow disclosure we’re witnessing now is not entirely on the up-​and-​up. Actual disclosure would lead, Burchett says, “to much gnashing of teeth.” But he believes that Trump has learned something. 

“He gets it now.”

Well, we don’t. Hand over the information.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
education and schooling government transparency

The Secret Teachings of Our Age

education, school, ideology, politics

The high school course was not “Logic and Semiotics in Western Culture” — or “Eastern.” It was not “Memes for Momes.” Or even “Cartoons from Cave Walls to Bathroom Stalls.”

It was “A History of Ethnic and Gender Studies.”

Do we dare ask what’s in it?

Doesn’t matter. Because we’re not allowed to see what’s in it.

“Michigan parents can’t request some school curricula under public record acts after the Michigan Supreme Court chose not to hear an appeal from a lower court,” explains the Michigan Capitol Confidential.

“On Sept. 25, the state’s top court denied an appeal filed by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy on behalf of a Rochester parent who requested the curriculum for a class held in the Rochester Public Schools district.” Using the “the state’s Freedom of Information Act, Carol Beth Litkouhi in 2022 sought course materials” for the class mentioned above. “Rochester Public Schools refused. The district argued that the law did not require it to provide records held by teachers.”

And so far — and barring a revision of state law — the public schools have won. 

Not a happy story, but even more than bad news for Michigan parents and (by extension) their children (the students in public schools), it demonstrates a mindset we’ve encountered before, and not confined to one school district or one state.

According to educators in public service, they have a right to teach your kids and not tell you what they are doing.

They are committed to doing this.

They are indoctrinators and not on your side.

They must be stopped. Politically. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability government transparency

He Lied About Who Died Where

Cuomo, Covid

Lying about data was not uncommon during the late pandemic. 

In April of 2020, I noted one way pandemic statistics were muddied: by paying hospitals more to identify a patient, surviving or not, as a COVID patient than as something else. This was especially devastating to death stats, perhaps mildly (or even wildly) over-​stating the effect COVID was having.

But understating the death count, or shifting it from one location to another, was also a problem. 

“Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo personally edited a government report that undercounted the Covid deaths that resulted from his March 2020 directive forcing nursing homes to admit coronavirus-​positive patients, a congressional panel concluded,” explains James Lynch at National Review.

 “The New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) issued a report in July 2020 faulting nursing homes for the spread of coronavirus in their facilities at the direction of Cuomo administration officials who ‘heavily edited’ the document, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic said in a memo released Monday.” As I prepare these words, that subcommittee is set to listen to the former governor’s testimony on “the directive and his administration’s apparent coverup of the death total.

“More than 9,000 Covid-​positive patients were admitted to nursing homes because of the ‘must-​admit’ order,” James Lynch adds.

Remember, Andrew Cuomo was once a star of the pandemic, hailed for “getting tough” on the spread of the virus, as in cracking down on church services — assumed (but never proven) to be the kind of “superspreader” events that “kill grandma.” He was so much a star of the brief, flaming epoch that he was awarded an Emmy for his performance. (It was later rescinded).

I guess lying — falsifying data — is a performance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts