Category: government transparency

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

Fifty-One & Nine & Two

Joe Biden, intelligence agency, spy, laptop, Hunter Biden

When 51 ex-intelligence officials signed the October 2020 “laptop letter,” they were lying to get Joe Biden elected as president. Yet, they also contributed to antagonizing Russia, further instilling distrust, and perhaps playing a part in the calculus prompting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a year after Biden was installed into his perilous perch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The former spooks, spies, and psy-op masters claimed that the Hunter Biden story possessed “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Yet, anyone who’d been following the strange story of Biden family corruption, now clearly laid out in detail in a 36-page memorandum by House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), knew from the beginning that those 51 former intel bigwigs were lying through their teeth.

Now one of them, former CIA Director John Brennan, has been interrogated by Congress — and implicated another CIA Director for organizing the disinformation campaign.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) had charged Brennan with recruiting the 51 signatories to the now-infamous letter, which not only provided ammo for Biden in the 2020 presidential debates, it enabled Twitter to suppress the story. But it now appears that the recruiter was, instead, then-Acting CIA Director Mike Morrell. 

In his four-hour testimony, Brennan confessed that the letter was “political” — that is, designed to get Biden elected.

The truth about the Biden family shake-down system, which evidence shows involved a whopping nine Biden family members, not just the “Big Guy” and his brother and his wayward son, taking in the big bucks from foreign sources, using a variety of bank accounts and shell corporations, but with no discernible product.

Back in 2020, those 51 trusted experts wrote: “It is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.”

And past time for our Deep State to halt its very clear pattern of domestic election interference.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency media and media people national politics & policies

Bioweapon

China, covid, virus, responsibility, bioweapon

Back in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton informed a Fox News audience that “just a few miles away from that food market [initially proposed as the epicenter of the outbreak] is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”

The Senator’s mere suggestion that the fast-spreading virus might have originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology labs — which were (a) known to be sloppy, and (b) doing U.S. funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses — was immediately labelled a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” by The Washington Post (which has since corrected its story).

Some scientists and pundits also expressed outrage — erroneously — at Cotton’s “implication” that China had unleashed a bioweapon. In Cotton’s defense, he never said any such thing. 

Hmmm?

When the lab leak theory made a comeback — after a year or more of Fauci & Co. colluding to snuff out the very thought — it seemed the one thing “we” somehow “knew” was that it certainly wasn’t a bioweapon.

Yet, unsure of its precise origin, how can we know that? 

“It matters little whether it was intentionally leaked from a lab or not,” Brian T. Kennedy, chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, explained at a recent Hillsdale College speech, “what is clear is that they allowed it to spread throughout the world knowing the harm it would cause.”

The Chinese rulers did this both by covering up human transmission for many weeks and by knowingly allowing hundreds of thousands of Chinese to travel throughout the world spreading the new virus. That’s why Kennedy calls it “a biowarfare attack against the United States.” 

In his book, No Limits: The Inside Story of China’s War with the West, Andrew Small writes about a well-placed Chinese friend who told him in January of 2020 that “the Chinese leadership had reached a decision: if China was going to take a hit from the pandemic, the rest of the world should too.”

With friends like China . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency insider corruption national politics & policies

The Regime Shows Its Fangs

IRS, corruption, power

“No one thinks it’s a coincidence,” says Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. “Everyone thinks this was done for intimidation reasons.”

The “this” was a visit by the Internal Revenue Service to the home of journalist Matt Taibbi while he was testifying to Congress about his Twitter revelation research.

Normally, the Regime’s collection wing, the IRS, does not just ‘stop on by’ unannounced.

The timing, Rep. Jordan suggested, is suspicious.

And the condemnations are coming in from more than just the “right.” A journalism professor at DePauw University joined the tide of free speech advocates to note that the “this” indeed “runs contrary to every principle” of the American press freedom as instituted in the First Amendment. 

The IRS has not so far clarified the visit, and Jordan is threatening to subpoena all documents related to the event.

Journalist Sharyl Attkisson — who “has long contended the Justice Department during the Obama administration illegally surveilled her while she was at CBS News,” explains Fox News — not unreasonably contends that the “IRS would have to know how their visit to Taibbi’s house would be construed, which suggests that’s exactly as they wanted it.”

The chilling effect is by design.

But why would The Regime be so blatant?

So clear in intent and corrupt in method?

Does The Regime feel impregnable?

Maybe the old lore of deviltry and contracts with the Principalities and Powers is true: evil feels compelled to signal what it is doing, at least nominally. Leaving it up to good people to see the signs.

Which we now cannot unsee.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency international affairs

Time for Truth Is . . . Now?

China, Covid, FBI

The “kooky” conspiracy hypothesis that in 2019 a Wuhan laboratory that had been rebuilding viruses to make them better, stronger, faster then somehow unleashed the COVID-19 virus on the world has been gaining traction lately.

Three years ago, such a thing was declared to be impossible, or at least extremely unlikely. After all, the Chinese government itself, which always tells the truth, had repudiated this explanation, even going so far as to conscientiously refuse to cooperate with investigations into the origin of the pandemic.

Many policy makers and media mavens in the West nodded vigorously. No need to inquire further.

But the dam has been breaking in recent months. Now, even U.S. government agencies — government agencies themselves! — are saying yeah, probably a lab leak.

The FBI has hopped on the probably-lab bandwagon and, according to its director, has been on the wagon a while.

FBI director Chris Wray says: “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

Quite some time now? And kept quiet?

Author James Kunstler wants to know if the FBI knew during all the time that fey Wray “was in charge of a battalion of FBI agents assigned to managing Twitter, Facebook, and Google . . . to make sure that anyone who opined about Covid coming from the Wuhan lab got censored, banished, cancelled, reputationally destroyed.”

It’s hardly “kooky” to inquire as to what the FBI was thinking, simultaneously believing something to be true and, yet, in contravention of the First Amendment, working to suppress that very belief.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom government transparency media and media people national politics & policies

The 2021 Spike

Covid, vaccines, side effects

The graph is startling. It shows VAERS reporting numbers in Florida from 2006 through 2022. 

VAERS is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Little blips of data run along the bottom of the graph through 2020, a year in which there were 2466 reports of negative effects. 

And then came 2021, the year in which mRNA and viral vector vaccines were rolled out in the United States, pushed heavily by the federal government and All Responsible Opinion, subsidized per the dose to the drug companies, as well as by lifting the burden of liability for . . . adverse effects.

The number of Floridians reporting such adverse effects soon after taking the vaccines spiked to 41,473.

The next year it subsided a bit, but to an otherwise walloping high of 9,104.

“In Florida alone, there was a 1,700% increase in VAERS reports after the release of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to an increase of 400% in overall vaccine administration for the same time period,” Florida Health tells us in the online “Health Alert on mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Safety,” of February 15. “The reporting of life-threatening conditions increased over 4,400%. This is a novel increase and was not seen during the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign.”

“Just publish the data; give us the facts,” Dr. John Campbell stated in his online talk on the report. He’s appreciative of the Sunshine State’s newfound transparency: “Well done, State of Florida.”

But nearly all other governments have failed to acknowledge such data much less act on it “in meaningful ways”: “badly done, other 49 states. Badly done, the UK; badly done, Europe; badly done, Canada; badly done, New Zealand, Australia.”

Quite a spike in government “badly dones.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war government transparency international affairs

Why the Balloon Story Ballooned

UFO, military, weather balloon, defense

“Ruling out aliens? Senior U.S. general says not ruling out anything yet,” ran the Reuters headline. This was over the weekend, “after a series of shoot-downs of unidentified objects,” Reuters explained, clarifying that for the real information, General Glen VanHerck would defer “to U.S. intelligence experts.”

You know, the people who start wars under false pretenses and hounded a sitting president with a fake dossier about bed-wetting prostitutes.

While General VanHerck simultaneously up-played and down-played extra-terrestrials, an unnamed source at the Pentagon denied any evidence for the crafts being anything but terrestrial. Sure. But remember the context: last week’s 200-foot-tall balloon episode.

“To be clear — The Chinese Balloon was an authentic UFO until it was identified,” tweeted Neil deGrasse Tyson. “It then became an IFO.”

I riffed off that truism when I covered the balloon story, too. But does that explain how quickly a balloon panic became a UFO panic?

Ever since World War II’s foo fighters we’ve had hints that something was not completely “normal” in our skies. But the military has never before boasted of shooting down UFOs — though ufology lore is full of stories about just such events.

VanHerck offers a possible explanation: after the balloon brouhaha, the radar tracking systems were reset to include things less jet-like and rocket-like than normal. So other things in the skies that seem anomalous — foo-fighter-like? — all of a sudden become serious concerns.

This was one of the reasons given for the founding of modern Pentagon tracking of “UAP”: there may be more than one type of strange “phenomena” flying/floating/darting-about in our skies, and the military should be able to distinguish one from another, especially from novel drone and other surveillance technology.

Especially in time of war.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling government transparency paternalism

Motown Bully

School Board, parents, government

Is the republican form of government unnatural?

People in government tend to balk at republican imperatives, anyway. You know, like transparency. Citizen control sure seems unnatural to politicians.

Case in point: Detroit.

“The Rochester Community School district is determined to keep the sun from shining on its operations,” writes Kaitlyn Buss in The Detroit News.

At issue is a new school board member, Andrew Weaver. He had campaigned on issues like “transparency, accountability and communication between the district and parents.” Well, Superintendent Robert Shaner does not like this agenda. He “sent a letter to the board president and vice president in late December targeting [the] newly elected board member” and threatening “legal action if Weaver is too forceful in challenging the way schools are being run.”

This is awfully brazen, and it should alarm parents in the Rochester Community School District. For it is not coming from some obscure bureaucrat: “Shaner was selected as Superintendent of the Year in 2020 and is one of the longest tenured and highest paid school leaders in the state.”

He epitomizes government, at least in the “education” wing of Michigan government.

Bullying is how he rolls.

Mr. Weaver explains it this way: “I sat there as a private citizen and wondered why our board didn’t do anything. Well, we found the answer. Because they’re all scared of getting one of those [letters].”

But perhaps Weaver’s prepared for the battle. Even as a parent he’d received two cease-and-desist actions from Shaner, who objected to his online attacks.

Politicians think they are kings. Above citizen criticism.

Which is why citizen control must be forced upon them. 

Over their objections.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency international affairs Snowden

The Turn-on-a-Dime’s Difference

UFO, UAP, unidentified flying object, government secrets

Over two out of five. The first articles I saw put the ratio at “nearly 50 percent,” but the percentage is, more accurately, “nearly 41.” What’s significant is we would expect that figure to be much, much lower.

I’m talking about UFOs. Or “UAP” — as it is now trendy to say. I’m going to stick with the old term, just to rub the long history of the subject into smug, refined noses.

The story is this: in an upcoming-any-day-now report to Congress on UFOs, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence claims that there were 366 military-reported Unidentified Aerial … er … Flying Objects, last year, and 150 of them remain unexplained and not likely to be explained, since they behaved extremely oddly. That is, they acted in classic “flying saucer” manner. 

“The unexplained ones they just have no clue,” says Daily Mail reporter Josh Boswell, “because these things are moving in ways that we just don’t understand. At hypersonic speeds, and then they just turn on a dime. I mean, it’s incredible.”

The bad news is that it appears these things “exist.” The good news, one can hope, is that now the military has protocols in place to handle such reports rather than turn each UFO/pilot interaction into a case fraught with secrecy and suppression, fear and consternation. The UFO reports now go to the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

It is worth mentioning that many of the stories in this upcoming report toe the old government line, insisting that these sightings are in theory explainable as enemy drones, etc. If true, drone tech has made serious advances!

And the world is even more dangerous than previously thought.

Or weirder.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights government transparency

Cough It All Up

public private partnership

The state attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden administration for censorship. Thanks to the lawsuit, we’re learning more and more about how federal officials have pressed Big Tech social media companies to muzzle users who dissent from the Official Narrative about the pandemic.

Much of the evidence coughed up as a result of the litigation has taken the form of email exchanges. An official might email a social-media rep something like: “We find this post disturbing. Can you do something about? Like maybe censor it?” The rep might double-quick reply: “Done! Anything else I can do today to secretly help the government circumvent the First Amendment?”

Certain officials have been particularly central in the saga, including eight persons that a judge is now letting plaintiffs depose: Anthony Fauci, former press secretary Jennifer Psaki, FBI agent Elvis Chan, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Carol Crawford of the CDC, Daniel Kimmage of the State Department, and a couple of others.

During her tenure Psaki spoke openly about the Biden administration’s demand for more censorship of “misinformation,” which is the new code word for disagreement. So it’ll be hard to deny that she said that stuff.

Crawford is in charge of the CDC’s digital media activities, activities that included regular meetings with staff of social-media companies.

Among other subjects, plaintiffs will be asking Anthony Fauci about an email exchange with Francis Collins discussing a “takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed lockdown policies.

I’m all ears.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency insider corruption

Six Million Dimes

Covid, Wuhan, bats, money

“EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak should not be getting a dime of taxpayer funds,” declared Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), “until they are completely transparent. Period.”

Nevertheless, “despite losing a previous award for failing to provide records essential to an investigation into that origin,” Daszak’s group is now slated to receive $600,000, The Intercept informs us.

While regular readers are well aware of what Rep. Rodgers calls “madness,” at Unherd.com’s The Post, Ashley Rindsberg refreshes our memories:

  • “EcoHealth Alliance is . . . responsible for funneling . . . US government grants to the now infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology, considered by many to be the likely source of the pandemic.”
  • Still, “[Daszak] was the go-to source for the American media as they sought to ‘prove’ that the lab leak theory was little more than a Right-wing conspiracy. He also surreptitiously organised a letter in The Lancet, attempting to shut down the debate by labelling this potential origin as a ‘conspiracy theory.’”
  • “Most alarmingly,” Daszak “submitted a 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that called for scientists to insert a furin cleavage site — a key distinguishing and extremely rare feature of SARS-Cov-2 — into SARS-like viruses. In other words: a blueprint for making SARS-2 in a lab.”

Instead of throwing money at EcoHealth Alliance (which would merely funnel it to a Chinese lab), invest in a thorough congressional investigation into how Dr. Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance, and co-conspirator Dr. Anthony Fauci purposely obstructed the inquiry into the origin of a pandemic that has killed more than a million Americans and nearly seven million worldwide.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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