Categories
government transparency progress responsibility

UFOs and Other Foes

Frivolous federal spending: you don’t approve; I don’t approve. Which is why I’m usually on Reason magazine’s side when it comes to government prodigality. But complaining about the money spent by the Pentagon to make sense of the UFO phenomenon misses the bigger story.

In “The Feds Spent $22 Million Researching Invisibility Cloaks, UFOs, and a Tunnel Through the Moon,” Fiona Harrigan sets up the problem: “The 2008 Defense Supplemental Appropriation Act included $10 million for the AATIP [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program] and the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act allotted $12 million, amounting to $22 million over five years. It is unclear how much of that money went toward researching UFOs and how much went toward invisibility cloaks, because how the money was used has been shrouded in secrecy.”

If when I’ve talked about these programs before I didn’t much discuss invisibility cloaks or spintronics and other ancillary aspects of UFO disclosure, it’s because I knew little about them … and neither, I gather, does Ms. Harrigan.

What they all show is the first teensy bit of transparency … on the apparently non-​dismissible persistence of aerial phenomena that were dubbed UFOs* by Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt in his 1956 study, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.

The military has apparently known about the puzzling reality of this phenomena for a long time. If we are to believe current reports, or past leaked documents like the Twining Memo, the objects observed by the military are (contrary to official statements) real objects intelligently controlled that do not behave according to the laws of physics that we were taught in school.

Ms. Harrigan warns us of a very different irregularity: how the research was contracted under the authorizing legislation.

That sure seems like the lesser story. 

The biggest story? Cover-​up. Investigation into UFOs couldn’t be done in-​house because of the layers of secrecy already in place. Non-​disclosure agreements’ and top-​level secrecy compartmentalization required outsourcing. We may have to accept some irregularities … the regular methods having led to secrecy of extreme sorts. 

The kind that makes the Deep State deep.

And as for invisibility cloaks: they are associated with UFOs, and would obviously be very useful for the military. Besides, cloaking technology is now in use, no longer a mere sci-​fi dream.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* Ruppelt thought the initials should be pronounced as one word: YOU-​foe!

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
Common Sense free trade & free markets general freedom property rights responsibility

Farming Is Fundamental

If you live in Maine, you may now grow your own food. The right to do so has been safeguarded in the state constitution.

If you have the right to life and to sustain your life, surely you have a right to farm. As we all know, though, governments regularly find excuses to interfere with all kinds of peaceful activities.

So this past November, Maine voters passed a constitutional amendment authored by Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham (whose energetic campaigns for freedom have previously caught Common Sense notice) and proposed by the legislature. 

Maine’s Right to Food Amendment makes clear that “All individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable … right to save and exchange seeds and the right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume . . . as long as an individual does not commit trespassing, theft, poaching or other abuses of private property rights public lands or natural resources in the harvesting, production or acquisition of food.” (So there’s no California-​style de facto “right” to loot.)

Foes of the amendment worry that it will enable people to bypass regulations.

Let’s hope so. 

Don’t we want the new law to ban governments in Maine from banning agriculture for the sake of “esthetics,” protecting Big Milk, or any other rationalization for foiling farming on a person’s own property?

And for the idea to spread to the other states, where far too often the scales of justice don’t properly consider the citizen’s right to produce food against the bureaucrat’s regulations frustrating same. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
deficits and debt folly national politics & policies responsibility

Biden Blames Business

Inflation’s up, and President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., thinks he knows why.

Economist Bruce Yandle, famed for his “Bootleggers and Baptists” theory of regulation, reports in Reason that the aging president blamed “the country’s three largest meatpackers” for contributing to July’s CPI rate of 5.4 percent, and the fuel industry for its part in August’s 5.3 percent annualized rate. 

Profiteering!

I’ve always wondered how anyone can get away with this tired old accusation. Businesspeople aim to profit at all times and in every place. Profit is why they go into business. Are they making too much inflation-​adjusted profit during an inflationary period but not when inflation is low? Seems unlikely.

But Biden’s looking into it! “There’s lots of evidence that gas prices should be going down,” the prez claimed, “but they haven’t.”

What evidence? Biden presented none. 

After throwing so much money into the economy to “stimulate” it after the big hit commerce has taken from state-​perpetrated lockdowns, what could we expect but rising prices? “Inflation is always and everywhere,” a great economist has said, “a monetary phenomenon.”

Bruce Yandle is on that same page. Referring to Mr. Biden’s bizarre blame game, Yandle suggested that maybe — just maybe — Biden “should look inside the halls of the West Wing.”

Specifically at all the spending, like the current “$3.5 trillion spending package.” The puppet masters pulling Biden’s strings must, Yandle asserts, “be aware that calling for more spending to calm inflation is like pouring gasoline on an already smoldering fire.”

The real problem is “too much printing-​press money” backing deficit spending.

Blaming excess profits? A distraction.

A big lie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
international affairs responsibility

The War Presidents’ Debacle

President Biden yesterday called the now somewhat* completed withdrawal of U.S., Afghan and coalition soldiers and civilians an “extraordinary success,” arguing that “no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history.”

There were a reported 120,000 people airlifted out, but with 13 U.S. soldiers killed in last week’s suicide attack at the Kabul airport, along with three British nationals and more than 160 Afghans — let’s cancel any victory lap.

Still, I’m more with Mr. Biden than with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who made the case on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace that the occupation of Afghanistan was a complete success, making the pull-​out (now over) a horrendous policy mistake. 

McConnell’s case for a never-​ending “Mission Accomplished” understates the costs in blood and treasure — by trillions of dollars, in part. Just like you would expect of a deficit-​and-​debt plotter.

“America’s longest war has been by any measure a costly failure,” argues David Rothkopf in The Atlantic, adding that “Joe Biden doesn’t ‘own’ the mayhem on the ground right now.” Instead, Rothkopf blames “20 years of bad decisions by U.S. political and military leaders.”

Rothkopf errs in letting Joe “The Buck Stops Here” Biden and the generals off the hook for the withdrawal. And gifting the enemy with a vast and sophisticated arsenal.

All four Afghanistan War presidents deserve blame, along with the war establishment, in government and out.

Remember: wars that cannot be won even with military victory on the battlefield should not be fought.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* The Biden Administration continues to pledge they’ll work to get Americans left in Afghanistan out. However, in an ABC News interview a little more than a week ago, Biden had committed that, “If there’s American citizens left, we’re going to stay until we get them all out.” 

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
responsibility too much government

Vaccines Without Passports

The coronavirus vaccination passport idea, in place in New York, attempted elsewhere, in development in Britain, and all the rage among policy pushers like Bill Gates, has been nipped in the bud in Florida and Texas. 

On Monday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed an executive order prohibiting “government-​issued vaccine ‘passports’ statewide.” The order prevents state agencies from establishing any requirement for vaccination on the populace. “The ban also extends to any organizations that receive public funds,” according to The Daily Signal, “forbidding those organizations from requiring Texans to prove they received the vaccine.”

After giving a pro-​vaccine statement, Abbott went on to reiterate his basic position, that “these vaccines are always [to be] voluntary and never forced. Government should not require any Texan to show proof of vaccination and reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives.”

He also stated that the state will continue to supply vaccines to citizens that want the shot(s).

Abbott followed a similar decree by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis by just a few days. At the beginning of the month, Abbott had lifted statewide mask mandates. Florida, as you have no doubt heard, has been a free state (as opposed to a quarantine state) for several months, to a major media pile-​on (and a lot of inaccurate reporting, including from 60 Minutes).

The World Health Organization does not support vaccination passports. Now. But WHO is a feather in the wind, like the Vichy-​blown government in the movie Casablanca, so strong opposition to the practice by public officers in the United States is most welcome.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
media and media people national politics & policies responsibility

Lab Rats III: Doubling Down on Danger

Ten months ago, I commented on a Newsweek article informing that “the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. [Anthony] Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-​of-​function research on bat coronaviruses.”

A deadly worldwide pandemic along with possibly explosive implications as to its origin, notwithstanding, the story went nowhere. 

Last week, I highlighted new evidence that aligns with the lab transmission theory pooh-​poohed in the World Health Organization report, which was quickly discredited — including by the WHO Director-General.

Yesterday, I went further into the cover-​up, and how the “conspiracy theorist” charge has been used by the confreres of the Wuhan scientists to dissuade anyone from looking in the direction of the dangerous research that had been conducted there. 

Josh Rogin’s Washington Post column gives greater context to the need to investigate the theory, expressed by Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control under President Trump, that SARS-​CoV‑2 was transmitted to humans accidentally through a Wuhan lab:

“Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and biosafety expert … said the entire genre of research Redfield was referring to, known as gain-​of-​function research (in which viruses are captured from the wild and developed in lab settings to make them more dangerous), needs to be thoroughly reexamined.” 

Worse? “The world’s current plan to respond to the pandemic entails a huge expansion of precisely this type of research,” Rogin explains. “The $200 million program meant to ‘predict’ virus outbreaks is set to grow into a $1.2 billion Global Virome Project …”

“The plan is,” Ebright told Rogin, “having failed to predict and preempt and having possibly triggered the current pandemic, to increase the scale six times.”

Emphasis added because, well, can it be emphasized enough?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Earlier in this Series:

12 Monkeys in Charge

June 18, 2020 

Lab Rats

March 31, 2021

Lab Rats II: The Conspiracy

April 6, 2021

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts