Tag: conspiracy

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crime and punishment government transparency scandal

So Horrible?

government institutions, secrets, conspiracy, UFO, UAP

Talking to Joe Rogan about the JFK assassination,Tucker Carlson argued that Trump’s and Biden’s withholding of information runs counter to American law. “There’s clearly something worth protecting,” he says, and he doesn’t mean the people involved — they’re all dead.

What’s being protected are, presumably, institutions.

According to Judge Andrew Napolitano, Trump told him that “if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn’t have released it either.” According to Roger Stone, Trump explained that what he saw was “so horrible you wouldn’t believe it” … and thus Trump withheld 20 percent of the documents that had been scheduled to be released.

So horrible? Many of us can imagine quite a lot of horror coming from the dark corridors of the federal Leviathan.

But there’s another generational secret that Trump and Biden share, and Tucker mentioned it too: UFOs.

Indeed, he and Rogan started out the podcast in a freewheeling discussion of what our government now calls “the UAP issue,” for “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” But Tucker focused on a “dark” and “spiritual” element to the story, giving little evidence except for the scientist’s name who had contacted him about the study of UFO injuries of military personnel.

Tucker also mentioned strangely behaving objects that traverse the oceans as if water were no matter. A few days earlier, a Yahoo News “Futurism” article explained that “Tim Gallaudet, an oceanographer and former Naval rear admiral who served as the author of a March white paper about so-​called ‘unidentified submerged objects’ or USOs, told Fox News this week that he considers it both ‘scientifically valid’ and critical to national security to study these phenomena.”

A lot of effort has been made in the recent disclosure talk to frame UAPs as potential threats. But what kind of threat? A “spiritual” one — “so horrible”? 

All we really know is that regarding assassinations and mysterious airborne and oceanic objects, the government would prefer to keep us guessing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency media and media people

Transient Stars

UAP, UFO, conspiracy, cover-up

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, UFOs and “flying saucers” made newspaper headlines, and government officials had contradictory things to say about them. Then, soon after 1952’s summer UFO flyovers of Washington, D.C, the government got into the denial game, and the general tenor of the conversation changed.

The federal government, it seems, had instituted a policy of “cover-​up.”

This has changed in the last few years, after a military investigation into UFOs went public, and as Congress began making public and confidential inquiries.

What do we really know?

Not much.

Still, that startling 1952 UFO wave appears to have received some additional evidence … from an unexpected quarter.

A team of astronomers compared old sky plates from the Palomar Observatory —photographed in the 1950s — to modern digitized pictures of the heavens, searching for “vanishing stars.” Appearing and disappearing stars are a fascinating study, in this research the aim being to detect “instances where a star directly collapses into a black hole.” The scientists found none of these “failed supernova” events. 

But what they found surprised them: “several images where multiple star-​like objects appear in a single snapshot of the sky, never to be seen again.”

They tested many possible explanations for the mysterious data, and then an automated search coughed up a doozy: “The image showed three bright and beautiful objects looking just like stars in a POSS‑I image from the 19th of July 1952 that appeared and vanished within a plate exposure.… The three bright objects seemed as real as Betelgeuse itself.”

These were not single bright dots on photographic plates, but multiple simultaneous dots.

As scientist Beatriz Villarroel writes, “our two most prominent and brightest cases of multiple transients coincided in time with the two weekends of the renowned Washington UFO flyovers.”

One wonders whether later mass-​sighting events, such as the “Belgian Wave” (November 1989 – April 1990) and Arizona’s “Phoenix Lights” (March 13, 1997), might have recorded similar transients above, ready for study. 

Thankfully, we do not need to rely directly upon government agents to do the research.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights partisanship too much government

Insane in the Meme Brain

Hillary Clinton, conspiracy, Donald Trump, deprogramming, cult

Sane Republicans do exist, says Hillary Clinton. Even in the House of Representatives!

We know this because they voted to continue federal government operations by raising the debt limit. Or so Mrs. Clinton says. It’s just “common sense”!

Talking with Christiane Amanpour on CNN, last week, the former presidential candidate explained that these sane Republicans are “intimidated,” adding, “they oftentimes say and do things which they know better than to say or do.”

To get to common ground with these compromised GOP folks, however, the measures that intimidate them — while exciting their extremist, insane MAGA proponents — must be roundly defeated. 

No compromise.

In times past, our representatives in Congress could work together; but back then, argues the former First Lady, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State, “there wasn’t this little tail wagging the dog of the Republican Party.”

That is, conservative representatives would kindly admit defeat every time the green light was given to more and more spending. Now they won’t cooperate.

It’s extremism, in Hillary’s judgment, to oppose the ceaseless growth of the warfare-​welfare state.

But, Hillary being Hillary, she had a corker to unleash. “Maybe at some point there needs to be a formal de-​programming of the cult members.”

Just like Mrs. Clinton to generously offer re-​education camps to her opponents.

Followed by an admonition: “we have to be smarter.”

How is it smart (or sane) to continually grow the federal debt, its mere service now larger than the defense budget?

By talking about formally deprogramming MAGA extremists Hillary Clinton skillfully deflects her supporters’ attention from the real need: informally deprogramming their own insane debt-​piling status quo mindset.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability too much government

[Not] Just Plain Bats

Covid, bat, gain of function, China, lab

It’s been several months since I’ve focused on Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), which was funded by your tax dollars to “improve” upon viruses found in nature. 

The evidence for this has been out there for some time, but many avoid drawing any conclusion, finding it circumstantial. Or something.

Remember Daszak being caught organizing the open letter in The Lancet, proclaiming all talk of gain-​of-​function research as “conspiracy” theorizing and “dangerous”?

Well, now The Lancet is reported to be preparing to publish an article going so far as to say that “there is no direct support for the natural origin of SARS-​CoV‑2, and a laboratory-​related accident is plausible.”

Meanwhile, my co-​podcaster, on his LocoFoco Netcast, quotes Daszak’s own public boastings (from YouTube), effectively laying out EcoHealth Alliance’s gain-​of-​function research, talking of insertions of the spiked protein, and referencing to his colleagues in China.

And now another revelation, via science writer Matt Ridley. Specifically, Drastic Research reveals an earlier Daszak grant proposal to inject “deadly chimeric bat coronaviruses collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology into humanised and ‘batified’ mice.”

This proposal — “named ‘DEFUSE’” — was not accepted by … oh, and this gets good … DARPA.

“In other words, a branch of the federal government had already judged aspects of EHA’s research … as falling under the definition of GOF [gain of function], only for [Health and Human Services] to approve similar work without P3CO review in 2018 and 2019,” the Drastic Research report summarizes.

So it was too iffy for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but hunky dory with our medical bureaucrats?

The story is more than just about bats, it’s about laboratory manipulation of existing viruses to create new viruses.

Which is, well, batty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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bat/​Covid

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government transparency media and media people social media

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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government transparency

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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