Category: government transparency

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The Argentine Ratline

Hitler, Argentina, Nazi

In less than one month, the 80th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s death may be celebrated — unless President Javier Milei’s formal disclosure of the Argentine “ratline” shows what a lot of people believe: that Hitler didn’t kill himself in that bunker.

Ratlines are what the human smuggling routes of Nazis out of falling Germany in 1945 were called.

And yes, Argentina was the chief receiver of Nazis. This is known. Confirmed. Not controversial.

But did the South American country accept Nazis higher up than Dr. Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann?

Well, the FBI was searching for Hitler in South America for decades, into the 1960s. And rumors of Hitler’s escape to Argentina have been bandied about for years and years.

But the official story, of Hitler’s suicide in the Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, has been stuck to, its skeptics frequently “debunked,” and “experts” have been mocking “conspiracy theorists” on this matter for a very long time.

Now, however, Javier Milei — perhaps inspired by Donald Trump’s disclosure attempts regarding the JFK assassination and Jeffrey Epstein’s honeypot scheme — has set in motion the release of Argentina’s “ratline files.” 

The Argentine government has committed to declassifying and releasing all government-sequestered information related to Nazi war criminals who sought refuge in the country after World War II. Formally announced by Cabinet Chief Guillermo Francos on March 24, the documents are said to include financial details and relevant records held by Argentina’s Defense Ministry.

What will we learn?

If we learn that Hitler lived long after 1945, what would be the repercussions?

Maybe it depends: who exactly — and in which government — arranged the escape?

Whatever the revelations, whatever the ultimate result, the Age of Deference is over; the Age of Disclosure has begun.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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De-Classification or Re-Regurgitation?

What do the JFK assassination files and an obscure booklet called “The Adam and Eve Story” have in common?

Both are examples of how the CIA and other Deep State actors keep us guessing and in the dark: by over-classification. 

A “sanitized” copy of Chan Thomas’s immortal classic of seeming ultra-nuttery, the aforementioned “Adam and Eve Story,” was de-classified in 2013. Now on the CIA’s website, it floats a wild theory about human history and life on this planet, complete with repeated global, world-turned-on-end catastrophes. 

Most people had never heard of the work until de-classified and placed on the website. The Wikipedia entry mentions the de-classification of the document but not why it was classified as secret in the first place.

Here’s a theory: to confuse us. 

The only reason most people ever give the booklet a second glance is because the CIA made it secret.

Now turn to the present, with something circulating today as “evidence” from the recent release of backlogged JFK assassination documents: a summary of passages in the New Left journal Ramparts, June 1967. It reproduces a rumor about one Gary Underhill and his alleged blurting out that “a small clique within the CIA was responsible” for the shooting in Dealey Plaza. 

All the rage online, but this document was merely the re-regurgitation of public information — which is what an awful lot of classified material is.

We take note of this Underhill story not because it proves anything, but because the report was made secret in the first place. 

It’s almost as if they want some people to believe something, and others to scoff at it all. 

But maybe what they are doing is burying us in useless “information.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Age of Deference 

Angela Merkel, Germany, Wuhan, Covid, virus, lab leak

We knew from the beginning that Wuhan, China, was not only ground zero for the coronavirus epidemic, but that there was an Institute of Virology there, and that the disease could have broken out of its lab. But it took a few months for my first report, and about a year passed before I delved deeper into the evidence for the “lab leak” hypothesis.

In December, the House Subcommittee investigating the subject concluded that there was evidence for a lab leak and none for a zoonotic origin of the disease.

Throughout the period, corporate news sources barely covered the story, despite its obvious importance and inherent interest. Instead, they covered for the culprits, the better to push a “vaccine” that was more novel than the “novel coronavirus” itself. 

Journalists seemed immune to acknowledging, for example, “the man the media missed,” Dr. Peter Daszak. Years before the leak, the doctor publicly boasted about using a Chinese lab to engage in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. And yet, he was placed on the World Health Organization team investigating the Wuhan situation!

Meanwhile, the CIA waffled.

Now we learn that German intelligence reported to then-Chancellor Angela Merkel favoring the lab leak hypothesis.

In 2020.

“Two German newspapers say they have uncovered details of an assessment carried out by spy agency BND in 2020 but never published,” explains the BBC. “According to Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, the BND met in Berlin in 2020 to look into the origin of coronavirus in an operation called Project Saaremaa.”

The “spy agency,” as the BBC neatly puts it, “assessed the lab theory as ‘likely,’ although it did not have definitive proof.”

And, as Dr. John Campbell notes, neither Merkel nor her successor came clean with any of this.

Dr. Campbell finds his resulting loss of trust has a bright side: “it’s made me re-evaluate many, many things.”

“The age of deference,” he concludes, “is past.”

All of our major institutions failed the pandemic test.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

Fire or Promote the Best?

DOGE, government waste, corruption, spending, debt

Things looked bad recently for Leland Dudek, an employee of the Social Security Administration.

Dudek almost got fired for helping the DOGE team understand how SSA’s systems work so that DOGE could zero in on wasteful or fraudulent payments.

On social media, Dudek wrote: “At 4:30pm EST, my boss called me to tell me I had been placed on administrative leave pending an Investigation. They want to fire me for cooperating with DOGE . . .

“I confess. I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE. . . . I moved contractor money around to add data science resources to my anti-fraud team. . . . I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”

An investigation? Administrative leave? For helping, as an executive-branch employee, the head of the executive branch to find and extirpate waste and fraud? SSA managers may have been confused about whether Donald Trump really is the president.

The suspense didn’t last long.

Dudek was not fired. Instead, the SSA commissioner was fired and Dudek became acting commissioner. 

“There are many good civil servants,” says Senator Mike Lee, “who have been quietly frustrated for years with politically motivated mismanagement [and] who possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the problems with their agencies. Put them in charge, hand them scalpels and flamethrowers.”

Could we have at long last found the cure for dimwitted obstructionism? A certain reality TV star had words for it: “You’re fired!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Gold of the Gods

gold bar, aliens, artifacts, UFO, UAP

There may be something more shocking than UFOs.

Non-existent gold.

Aliens and crash-landed flying saucers are not supposed to exist. Experts have been telling us they are mere fantasy and rumor for longer than I’ve been alive.

Meanwhile, experts at the U.S. Mint insist that something very different does exist: “approximately 147.3 million troy ounces of gold stored at Fort Knox in Kentucky.”

We have testimony from two senators on these subjects. 

Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Az.), who ran for the presidency in 1964, infamously said: “I think that, at Wright-Patterson Field, if you could get into certain places, you’d find out what the Air Force and the Government knows about UFOs.” 

He went on to say that, even while heading the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was barred from entering the Air Force base.

His buddy General Curtis Le May also blocked the senator. “I’ve never heard him get mad, but he got madder than hell at me” for asking to see the evidence. “He cussed me out. ‘Don’t ever ask me that question again.’” 

Senator Rand Paul (R.-Ky.) has a similar story about Fort Knox. He’s tried to get inside to see the alleged gold but has always been rebuffed. 

And given no reasons.

Elon Musk, asked on X about the gold, with the suggestion that DOGE look into it, was surprised to learn from Senator Paul that there has been no believable audit of Fort Knox in decades.

Elon says he’s game to hold a public inspection.

The Government may house downed UFOs but no gold!

Which is worse?

Not knowing. 

Time to open up the vaults — in Fort Knox as well as Wright-Patterson.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Addendum: “I’m actually going on this one,” President Trump said to a roomful of Republican governors, yesterday. “We’re going to open up the doors. I’m going to see if we have gold there. Did anybody steal the gold in Fort Knox?”

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government transparency Update

Super Bowl LIX Disclosure?

Transparency in government may be reaching a new venue: “Elon Musk is rumored to be spending $40 million of his own money,” explains Anthony Gareffa of TweakTown, “on five commercials during one of the most-watched events in the world — the Superbowl — highlighting U.S. government waste that DOGE has found.”

According to Michael Flores the number is four: “At the Superbowl in 2025 Trump is embracing new tech which has been blocked before. Musk is delivering four ads to the Superbowl about what he discovered in the Treasury files. Just before the game begins.

“These ads will also be shown in the stadium.” And Donald Trump will be in the audience, in the stands. Flores claims to be floored by this: “No matter who wins the games, this is history they will write about for centuries to come.”

In an email letter, Flores goes further: “Nothing in American politics will ever be the same again. We are talking about theft so ingrained in the system that they didn’t even try to hide it. But how they did it is now mapped out by computers. How long they did it is mapped by computers. Money that could have helped the poor. Could have paid for Social Security for years.”

Will this really happen? See for yourself: “The game is scheduled to begin at 6:30pm Eastern Time, on February 9, 2025, at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana. . . . The game will be televised in the United States by Fox and streamed on Tubi.”

The game itself pits the Kansas City Chiefs against the Philadelphia Eagles, the Chiefs are favored — but it may be the Democrats who lose big. Democrats and their elaborate ways to give their causes taxpayer money.

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government transparency insider corruption national politics & policies

The Biden Is No More

Joe Biden, stumble, exit

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., went out as he came in, plagiarizing.

Well, in style anyway, his bizarre farewell address striking ultra-familiar themes. 

“Most Biden speeches are acknowledged (Lincoln, Obama) or unacknowledged (Neil Kinnock, John Kennedy) homages to other politicians,” explains Matt Taibbi. “This last Biden attempt at an Eisenhower impersonation offers an anti-insight. We’re warned about an ‘oligarchy,’ which Webster’s defines as ‘a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.’” 

And here the intelligent reader is already ahead of the author. 

“He tries to tag disobedient billionaires like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg (as opposed to Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Steven Schwartzman, etc.) as this new oligarchy, but there’s one closer to home, which Biden referenced later in the speech: ‘In the years ahead . . . it is going to be up to the president, the presidency, the congress, the courts, the free press and the American people . . . I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands. . . . Now it’s your turn to stand guard.’

“Biden’s possibly ad-libbed distinction between ‘president’ and ‘presidency’ was the most inspired line of his career,” Taibbi quips.

And eerily defining . . . of Biden’s stint at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue . . . and various vacation hot spots.*

Taibbi contrasts the man — “stumbling, tumbling” — with the machinery of the office — run by a mostly-unseen cabal Taibbi defines with reference to H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The Invisible Man.

Other sci-fi metaphors come to mind. In his penultimate paragraph, Taibbi mentions Frankenstein filmmaker James Whale, and then in his last line Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man. But didn’t Philip K. Dick provide a hundred examples of fake personae as presidents and tyrants? 

Except that the Biden Administration, whatever it might have been, was limited in its power because it lacked legitimacy from half the population — and was as cognitively challenged as Biden himself.

Yesterday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Meet the Press that our sleepy commander-in-chief had been manipulated by his staff into signing key executive orders under false pretenses. And running interference for this Democratic Party “presidency” were Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.).

Thank goodness, the Age of “The Biden” is over.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Biden spent 40 percent of his term in office “on vacation.”

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The August Workings!

“Congress has secretly paid out more than $17 million of your money,” Representative Thomas Massie tweeted last week, “to quietly settle charges of harassment (sexual and other forms) in Congressional offices.”

Sounds nasty when he states it like that. He could have said Congress has valiantly kept litigation from disturbing the august workings of the world’s greatest deliberative body!

But seriously, Massie tells the truth and offers a challenge: “Don’t you think we should release the names of the Representatives? I do.”

He refers to the names of the accused in Congress. The ones bailed out of criminal and civil action, along with public obloquy, to the tune that only two-digit millions can play.

Amusingly, Representative Massie compares and contrasts congressional hanky-panky and hush-money payments with those of former and future president of the United States, Donald Trump. “The allegation is that President Trump paid $130,000 of his own money but here in Congress we have . . . there may be some on this dais!” The “some” are the bailed-out accused harassers whom Massie works with every day.

Imagine the love Massie must feel from his fellow brothers and sisters in Congress Assembled, with his demand for complete transparency.

Years ago I quoted CNN on the hush-money issue. “The current system in place does not require the [Office of Compliance] to make public the number of sexual harassment complaints, number of settlements reached, the dollar figure of those settlements or which offices are being complained about. Congressional aides say this is giving unintentional cover to the worst offenders in Congress.” 

I questioned whether that was “unintentional.”

It’s not called “hush money” because it brings things out in the open!

Were I the twice-impeached Donald Trump, I’d bring up that $17 million every time I addressed Congress. After all, Trump paid for his own . . . alleged . . . indiscretions. 

Our representatives have made us pay for theirs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Managing the President: 2021–2024

Joe Biden, deep state, lizard people

Yesterday, we considered the farce of Congresswoman Kay Granger (R-Tex.), serving out her term from an assisted living home — suffering, her family says, from “dementia issues.”

So, today, let’s discuss the donkey in the room: the president of these United States, one Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. 

“Throughout his presidency, a small group of aides stuck close to Biden to assist him, especially when traveling or speaking to the public,” explains a major exposé in the Wall Street Journal.

How “throughout”? Almost from day one: “a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on,” notes The Journal, “in just the first few months of his term.”

The reportage confirms what we suspected. “The protective culture inside the White House was intensified because Biden started his presidency at the height of the Covid pandemic. His staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting in-person interactions with him. But the shell constructed for the pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it.”

This structure also served to cover for Biden’s most characteristic failing, “foot-in-mouth”: his hand-holders sought “to prevent Biden, an undisciplined public speaker throughout his half-century political career, from making gaffes or missteps that could damage his image, create political headaches or upset the world order.”

Not a morning person, the staff concocted an elaborate schedule of afternoon meetings which they tried to keep very short. “If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether.”

Perhaps most importantly, “[t]he strategies to protect Biden largely worked,” the report reminds, “until June 27, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump.”

Luckily, the Washington cabal has not quite figured out a way to have a president as figure-head only and keep the deception from the American electorate. 

But too close for comfort.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war government transparency public opinion

Only a Test?

drones, military, defense, brainwashing, PSYOP, psychology

“This has been a test, and only a test. 

“Of the Emergency Propaganda System.

“In case of a real emergency, we would have bombed you already.

“Or infected you with a new disease from one of our gain-of-function labs.

“Or (and this is a real stretch) found the missing plutonium that’s always whispered about.

“Instead, the mystery drones were a scheduled test run of a newly developed drone technology, which the FAA had this last month scheduled as a testing period for the product. The developer is an above-board military contractor in New Jersey. The test period was indicated in a bulletin. Somebody outside the military must’ve read it.

“Now, if we had the interests of the citizens in mind we would have made a big deal out of the FAA bulletin. Or at least referred to it after people began noticing the drones.

“But let’s get real. We did not do either of those things. Instead, we reacted as if we knew nothing. And, of course, most government functionaries knew nothing. But the Biden administration knew,* and the Federal Aviation Administration knew, and the CIA and the NSA and the military knew. We could have told everyone the whole truth.

“We didn’t because we needed to learn how people would react to a swarm of oversized drones dotting the skyscape. This was a test of how Americans would react in a possible (and admittedly eerie) emergency.

“And, boy, did citizens react entertainingly. Some people — easily confused by parallax effects — saw more drones than existed, misidentifying normal airliners for drones, for grand example.

“Some people opportunistically made fake video footage. Some of those fakers may or may not have been paid by tax dollars.

“And some people noticed non-drone UFOs, and reported them. We won’t talk about those, either, even when they appear over the Pentagon.

“Remember: Only a test.”

And this, here at ThisIsCommonSense.org, is Common Sense. And I’m Paul Jacob.

* Unless nobody bothered to tell the Lame Duck-in-Chief. See Wednesday’s witless assurance.

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