Category: government transparency

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Conspirators versus Conspiracists

conspiracy, tin foil

“Conspiracy theories circulated online over social media contribute to a shift in public discourse away from facts and analysis,” proclaims a new study by the Rand Corporation think tank, “and can contribute to direct public harm.”

Titled “Detecting Conspiracy Theories on Social Media,” the study, paid for by Google’s Jigsaw unit, proposes to “improve machine-learning technology for detecting conspiracy theory language by using linguistic and rhetorical theory to boost performance.”

All very fascinating, but . . . do conspiracy theories shift public discourse away from “facts and analysis”?

They do challenge accepted facts, and are themselves examples of extended analyses. 

Often off track? Sure. 

But their problematic nature is not as stated.

The assumption throughout is that conspiracy theories are always in error. But when the report goes on to say that “conspiracists also distrust authority and believe that those who produce the news are lying to them,” there’s no fact check — why do the Rand authors believe we are not being routinely lied to?  

This becomes almost funny with the COVID origination debate. The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory is one of four current popular conspiracy notions the report looks at. And when the report was being written, the lab leak theory was marginalized on social media and pooh-poohed amongst most public health experts. Now we know that there was an actual conspiracy to bury evidence for it.

Truth is: conspiracies happen. Most bandied-about theories may be cuckoo, but a few turn out rock solid.

The honest way to deal with suspicions of a conspiratorial nature is pointed inquiry into relevant facts . . . with careful analysis.

The Rand Corporation and Google are more interested in defending the authorities.

Who often lie.

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 national politics & policies social media

Authoritative!

Daszak, Covid, censorship

Just when you thought you knew all the ways our “authoritative” institutions have blocked information from us regarding the origin of COVID-19, another shoe drops.

Early in this pandemic, we learned that the World Health Organization (WHO) lacked any credibility, as their “scientists” shamelessly peddled the dishonest Chinese government line of no human-to-human transmission. 

Still, Big Tech was there to help shut down dissenting opinions in America. “Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations,” declared YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, “would be a violation of our policy” — and be banned.

We now know that Dr. Peter Daszak, the man who funneled U.S. taxpayer dollars from the National Institute of Health to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses took place, also created The Lancet’s lying letter, which offered the media an official source to level a “conspiracy theory” charge at skeptics of a zoonotic COVID origin.

While claiming its authors, including Daszak, innocent of any “competing interest.” 

Big Media — somnolent or else actively disinterested in checking the accuracy or even credibility of the WHO, Daszak, and other scientists — proclaimed the lab-leak theory debunked. 

Thus, they could ignore China; blame Trump. 

Facebook joined YouTube and others in actively preventing us from communicating about COVID, specifically its origin — using none other than Dr. Daszak as an advisor on their censorship strikes.

The other shoe?

Dr. David Feinberg, head of Google Health, acknowledged at a recent conference that the search engine had actively blocked users from finding information on the virus’s origin.*

Why? Feinberg said Google did not want to “lead people down pathways that we would not find to be authoritative information.”

Leaving us with authoritative disinformation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* This courtesy of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who also discussed The National Pulse report that “Google funded research conducted by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.” 

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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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Fravor’s Fake UFOs?

UFO, disclosure, conspiracy

In just weeks, the Pentagon will report to Congress on the matter of UFOs. 

Though the subject appears vast, beginning before World War II’s “foo fighters” and extending right up to Colorado’s ongoing (?) “drone” mystery, the impetus for much of the recent interest comes from one source: a declassified set of telemetry data and FLIR footage from an alleged UFO encounter off the coast of California on November 10, 2004.

Brought to the fore by former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Luis Elizondo, and backed up by the testimony of Navy fighter pilots who took the footage, Commander David Fravor, preeminently, these videos had been hacking around the Internet for years, and repeatedly “debunked.” 60 Minutes did a segment on the subject, recently, but ignored the debunkers. So a popular junk science debunker on YouTube, an engineer known as Thunderf00t, demonstrated how the technology used by pilot Fravor produces images of normal flying objects that can look . . . alien . . . to novices.

The problem with this debunking, as with previous ones, is that it deprecates the context. Specifically, the testimony. Thunderf00t dismisses the pilots as “UFO nuts.”

But he does not directly deal with the testimony. “This is not like we saw it and it was gone or I saw lights in the sky and it’s gone,” Commander Fravor explains — “we watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers.” He also asserts that the “things” blocked radar and behaved as if they could read minds or instantaneously crack secure Navy communications.

If the debunkers are correct about the footage being grossly misinterpreted, the surrounding testimony amounts to lies. We novices might be fooled by FLIR, but not trained fighter jet personnel. And if they are lying, then the Pentagon should know and say. 

For decades, the military has been telling us, publicly, that UFOs aren’t a thing. Now it appears they are telling us they are.

Am I the only one who is curious?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Do Not Discuss This!

UFO, disclosure, media, conspiracy

Some stories linger in the background, under-acknowledged, never really addressed, driving us a bit crazy.

Example? Deficit spending and debt accumulation.

The problems that deficit financing inflicts upon us are many and devastating. We would be a lot wealthier, healthier, and wiser were the federal government not so madly out-of-control. We could invest in all sorts of great things, and prices would be more stable, and . . . and . . . and . . .

But what can we do about it?

It’s not obvious. So we don’t talk about it much. 

And the debt only grows, with destructive hyperinflation looming as an ever-increasing danger.

The other under-discussed story is even more disturbing — so we ignore it even more studiously.

Within the last several years headlines in The New York Times and on TV have covered it, yet . . . very few people talk about it, despite the startling revelations.

The issue? UFOs — a strange subject at face value, which, once you poke into it, gets even weirder.

We level-headed yokels used to deny the existence of UFOs, but now the Pentagon has confirmed their persistent plaguing of Navy jets and seacraft, and the Army has acknowledged its ongoing study of UFO-derived “meta-materials.”*

In June, the Senate will be briefed on the subject, per instructions in a recent stimulus bill. (Which brings us back to our first blank-out issue.) Meanwhile, as we wait for what could be big news, new revelations of repeated incursions by UFOs against a Navy fleet 100 miles off the California coast back in 2019 appear in specialty media** but barely make a ripple in major media.

Wait — Fox just featured a segment on a Pentagon confirmation of flying pyramids!

Will we make headway on UFOs before the debt?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * French scientist and UFO researcher Jacques Vallee is also engaged in research on UFO-site-retrieved mystery alloys.

** See Richard Dolan discuss these recent Channel Island incursions, based chiefly on the report in The Warzone.

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previously on Common Sense with Paul Jacob:

It’s Aliens (May 30, 2019) 

The Whys Behind the Whats (June 25, 2019)

Stranger Things 2019 (January 2, 2020) 

Two Conspiracies Unearthed (December 10, 2020) 

Why We Still Live (December 18, 2020) 

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government transparency

Why We Still Live

war, War Games, nuclear war, MAD

The year was 1983. One man, trusting his instincts and his knowledge of how technology can fail, averted catastrophe by not “pushing the button” to launch Soviet missiles at the United States.

It was September 26, and we celebrate it here, at Common Sense with Paul Jacob, as Petrov Day, after the day’s hero — indeed, the world’s hero — Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. Though tensions were running high in the early Eighties, Petrov suspected a false alarm. Events proved him right.

Petrov is not alone on this specific heroes’ list. There’s also Vasily Alexandrovich Arkhipov, who averted disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

But the oddest list candidates might not be human.

A week ago or so, when I reported that a former head of the Israel space programs, Professor Haim Eshed, had talked, in an interview, about Israeli and American diplomatic relations with a “Galactic Federation” — yes, of extra-terrestrial aliens — I failed to mention that he had also claimed aliens had averted nuclear war.

Is he crazy? Lying?

Well, ufology lore and de-classifed military documents tell of repeated — and unnerving — UFO incursions into the operations of both Russian and American military nuclear missile installations. We could easily dismiss these claims when the U.S. military was denying any mysterious UFO reality out there — after all, people like to tell tall tales — but that’s not the case now, when the Pentagon has confessed that something very real and really weird is indeed going on in our oceans and atmosphere.* 

But the Pentagon is not admitting to treaties with alien civilizations. The “official position” of the U.S. military, despite increasing numbers of disclosures, is that the UFO phenomenon “appears to remain a mystery,” as Tim McMillan concludes his recent extensive survey of official congressional briefings for The Debrief. 

Still, the official, accepted reason we have not experienced massive thermonuclear war is merely game-theoretic: no winners being possible, as we learned in a popular movie a few months before Stanislav Petrov had to make his big decision, rational players wouldn’t start one.

Yet, Mutually Assured Destruction is initialized MAD, and those with limited faith in human reasonableness not unreasonably consider, at least, other explanations for our continued survival. 

So, hail Petrov; honor Arkihipov; and . . . consider . . . aliens?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * As we have learned in the reporting, “Flying Saucers” aren’t the only form seemingly inexplicable UFOs take. The latest is “triangle.”

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A Glossary for Our Times

Trump Derangement Syndrome, TDS, Covid 19, infection, virus, meme

Reminder: SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus that is said to cause COVID-19.

Scientists and doctors are still learning about the novel virus and the new disease. Much of the information is uncertain, in part because it has become politicized, making it hard to navigate both medical and political subjects.

Making sense of the data or the arguments is more difficult because people confuse the terminology. The virus is not the disease, the disease is not the virus, though by metonymy, we do swap terms. Don’t let a mere figure of speech fool you.

As awful as COVID-19 is, in America, more citizens are affected negatively by the virus popularly known as TDS. 

Perhaps we should call it TDS-2016, since the three letters stand for “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Though the mind-virus (meme) was rampant from the moment Donald Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, the illness is not the meme itself. The illness, or behavioral syndrome, is how host brains process the meme. And it did not really set in as a disease until Trump got the Republican nomination. That’s when Democrats stopped laughing so hard and began to take Trump seriously.

And drive themselves crazy.

As with COVID-19, the worst cases depend upon co-morbidities. In TDS-2016’s case, co-morbidities include a sense of entitlement (that your side must always win); a denial of culpability in ramping up political polarization (in such things as the corruption-challenged candidacy of Hillary Clinton); and in flirting with other memes (such as “democratic socialism” and “wokism”).

As we approach Election Day 2020, TDS-2016 will only grow. The meme itself has proven resilient. We appear not to have reached herd immunity yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Definitions:

meme n. 1. an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation. 2. a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.

metonymy n. a figure of speech featuring the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing.

herd immunity n. a key concept in epidemiology where the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease within a population that results when a sufficiently high proportion of individuals become immune to the disease, through exposure by infection or vaccination: the level of vaccination needed to achieve herd immunity varies by disease but ranges from 83 to 94 percent. [Discussions of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 that do not mention herd immunity can only have limited value.]

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Hit PLAY for Transparency

Leaked bodycam video shows new details of George Floyd's arrest

“[George] Floyd’s death changed everything,” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson told viewers two nights ago, calling it “a pivot point in American history.” 

Given “the significance of the event, it’s striking how little we really know months later about how exactly George Floyd died,” argued Carlson, before playing bits of the 18-minutes of police cam video obtained by Britain’s Daily Mail. “The official storyline . . . couldn’t be clearer. Established news organizations state as a matter of factual certainty that Floyd was . . . murdered by a Minneapolis police officer.”

“But does it reflect what really happened?” Carlson asked. 

“Floyd had a number of narcotics in his system, including enough fentanyl to die of an overdose,” the Fox host advised. “One of the best-known symptoms of fentanyl overdose, by the way, is shortness of breath. In the video, Floyd complains that he is having trouble breathing, famously, but says that long before the police officer kneels on his neck.”

Writers at The Wrap and The Huffington Post quickly took Carlson to task for suggesting that the new video evidence in any way altered the media narrative of events, pointing out that two separate autopsies determined Floyd’s death to be a homicide.* 

Neither a medical doctor nor a criminologist, Carlson is right about two things: 

(1) “The American people should have been allowed to see police body camera footage . . . much sooner than this week.”

(2) “You can decide for yourself what you think of that video.”

The point of police wearing body cameras is to give the public as clear a picture as possible. Had the full video been seen earlier, some of this summer’s violence may have been forestalled.

It should not take someone violating a court order to hit play for the public.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Later in the program, Carlson expressed his opinion that the tape fails to exonerate Officer Derek Chauvin, who held his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes.

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America Unmasked

virus, coronavirus, pandemic, mask,

For weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services told us not to wear face masks. The Surgeon General even warned that mass use of masks could “increase the spread of the coronavirus.” 

“My nose tells me,” I posted on Facebook weeks ago, “that all the info about how we don’t need face-masks is to cover up for the lack of face-masks.”

My family is very grateful to a Taiwanese friend, who mailed me masks — not the N95 masks, which the Taiwanese government is donating in large quantities, but masks of excellent non-medical quality. 

Last Wednesday, CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell noted that a large percentage of people spreading the virus are asymptomatic, meaning they don’t know they have it. She asked Dr. Anthony Fauci with the White House Coronavirus Taskforce: “Should we be advising people to wear masks?”

“The primary people who need masks are healthcare workers,” the doctor replied, before admitting that if supplies weren’t so limited, wearing a mask was “a potentially good way . . . you could have an impact with preventing transmission.”

Days later, President Trump passed on a CDC advisory to the same effect.

Americans had figured out the initial lie, and were already making their own and posting how to do so on social media. Now that’ll ramp up. 

Initially, our leaders didn’t level with us. They could have. Americans seem amazingly cooperative, to say the least.

Government folks need to stop masking the truth from the public. That way they might earn more public trust.

Which sure can be useful during a crisis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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