Category: government transparency

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government transparency

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) 

Categories
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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government transparency national politics & policies

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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Accountability crime and punishment government transparency

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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government transparency national politics & policies responsibility

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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virus, coronavirus, pandemic, mask,

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government transparency ideological culture responsibility

People Power in the Republic of China

responsibility, command, politicians, control, self reliance,

Which country has handled this worldwide pandemic best?

The question was asked on Facebook, by one friend, and answered this way by another: 

“Government: South Korea; People: Japan.”

My response?

“Combo of people and government: Taiwan.”

There is a lot in the Taiwanese response to explore. 

“The first cause of Taiwan’s success,” write Javier Caramés Sanchez and William Hongsong Wang on Mises Wire, “is the transparency of information, which stopped the rapid growth of infection.” While on Mainland China the corrupt government was no more transparent than the very murky Yellow River, in the Republic of China (commonly called Taiwan, and once listed on the globe as “Formosa”) the Ministry of Health and Welfare began informing the public as early as December 31.

The second reason? “The type of quarantines established by the Taiwanese government are mostly self-​quarantines. The Taiwanese government acknowledges that it is crucial to rely on people’s voluntary actions to resist the pandemic.” In Japan the people regularly don masks when sick. That kind of compliance is cultural there. In Taiwan, there has been a lot of spontaneous and “all you need to ask” compliance with social distancing and the like.

“The key is that the Taiwanese government and the Taiwanese people understand that the individual’s own responsibility and actions are essential to suppressing the coronavirus pandemic, not a mandatory massive shutdown,” the authors conclude. “This is what the world needs to learn.”

Responsibility is what a free people practice. And learn to master.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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responsibility, command, politicians, control, self reliance,

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