Tag: conspiracy

The Whys Behind the Whats

UFO, navy, flight, tracking, military, disclosure, secret, conspiracy,

“[H]ow quickly our differences worldwide would vanish,” said Ronald Reagan in 1987, “if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

Does that Reaganite talking point give us any hints about the current series of disclosures about Unidentified Flying Objects?

I noted the most recent story to hit mainstream news on Sunday, about members of the U.S. Senate being briefed on the many repeated Navy encounters around the world with Unexplained Aerial Phenomena — “UAP” being the current euphemism for “UFO.”

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the bulk of these news stories have been driven by a cadre of former government officials and contractors who have investigated UAP as part of a Pentagon research program. Now members of a non-profit educational corporation, they are on a mission to break the government-imposed silence and compartmentalized lock-up of knowledge about the phenomena.

This being America, the effort also has a History Channel tie-in.

But much of the buzz appears to be coming from outside that core group, some of it focusing on leaked documents relating to a 2002 meeting between a scientist and a Navy admiral. The subject matter includes a secret program studying actual, hangered examples of ultra-strange flying craft* kept deeply secret — even from current military command — in the corporate wing of the military-industrial complex.

A new threat to unite us all? Or just another excuse to throw taxpayer funds down the Pentagon/military-industrial complex rathole?

The ongoing UFO disclosure might be neither of these yet still not what it seems.

We should keep our minds open, but our suspicions set on high alert.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The technology in question, in this document as well as in the footage disclosed in 2017, purportedly does not use propellers, jets, or rockets to move extremely rapidly, change course immediately, and hover.

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Tags conspiracy, disclosure, flight, military, navy, secret, tracking, UFO

folly individual achievement media and media people

Bezos’s Big Breakaway

Something big may be about to happen.

Trump impeachment? Financial collapse? War with Iran? — each is all-too-likely, none desirable. But I am referring to space.

In The Economist, May 14th, we read of Jeff Bezos’s itch to live off-planet.

The article is “Amazon’s boss reckons that humanity needs an HQ2,” which tells us that on “May 9th the founder and boss of Amazon, who also runs Blue Origin, a private rocketry firm, unveiled plans for a lunar lander. ‘Blue Moon,’ as it is called, is just one phase of a bold plan to establish large off-world settlements.”

And then comes the obvious literary-cultural reference: “It is a vision ripped directly from 20th-century science fiction.”

Can we dismiss it as space opera, though? A number of major figures, not least of whom is Elon Musk (whose Space X has often been mentioned here), are talking seriously about near-term orbital, lunar, and Martian habitation.

It is hard to wrap my head around an imminent private space colony project. It has always been something for the indefinite future, not something I expected to see.

There remain scoffers, of course (and they may well be right), as well as more paranoid speculations — are the higher-ups, the most insidery of insiders, tipping their hand to a “breakaway civilization” event, perhaps to avoid worldwide catastrophe?

“People now have more information” than in the past, wrote Thomas M. Disch in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998), “and they are smarter, overall, as a consequence — even in those ways they choose to be dumb.”

I am keeping an open mind on whether Bezos’s proposed lunar colony is dumb or genius.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. The government is also jumping on board the Moon bandwagon, with the president floating a similar-to-Bezos schedule.

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Tags conspiracy, Jeff Bezos, luna, Moon

Accountability folly government transparency local leaders media and media people too much government

Low Bigotry Expectations

tin foil hat, D.C. Councilman Trayon White, climate control, conspiracy, jews, antisemitism

“Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man. Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation,” explained Washington, D.C. Councilman Trayon White back in March.

White (who is black) went on to accuse “the Rothschilds” (who were Jewish financiers) of “controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man.”

Man. Oh. Man.

White later apologized, taking up the invitation of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington to tour the Holocaust Museum. During the tour one of White’s staffers referred to the infamous Warsaw Ghetto as “a gated community.” Then, before the tour’s end, the councilmen unceremoniously bugged out.

Next, news broke that Councilman White had used his constituent services account,* which the Washington Post reports “must [by law] benefit D.C. residents,” to send $500 to a Nation of Islam event in Chicago.

At which Minister Louis Farrakhan denounced Jews.

The Post noted how all this “turned into a test of the ability of city officials to handle the explosive race and class resentments that can arise in a city whose prosperity masks a troubling gap between its haves and have-nots.”

Even D.C. Council member Elissa Silverman (who is Jewish) echoed the partial excuse that White “represents the poorest parts of our city, . . . whose residents feel like they haven’t benefited, and the remarks were directed at a community that’s largely affluent here, and seen as powerful.”

Is bigotry against an entire religion wrong or not so much, depending on the race or socio-economic status of the people espousing the bias?

No, man.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Why do we have programs allowing politicians to hand out free money? This never ends well.

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Tags antisemitism, climate control, conspiracy, D.C. Councilman Trayon White, jews, tin foil hat

Accountability crime and punishment government transparency insider corruption local leaders media and media people Popular

Sweet Schadenfreude?

Arkansas State Senator Jon Woods, corruption, Arkansas, conspiracy, wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering

Yesterday, jurors convicted former Arkansas State Senator Jon Woods on 15 felony counts consisting of conspiracy, wire fraud, mail fraud and money laundering.

Woods was at the center of a corrupt scheme to reward cronies at Ecclasia College and AmeriWorks with GIFs — state General Improvement Funds — in return for kickbacks. Former State Rep. Micah Neal, his co-conspirator, pleaded guilty more than a year ago. And last month, the former president of Ecclesia College, Oren Paris III, also admitted guilt.

Regular readers may remember Woods as the Senate author of Issue 3, placed on the 2014 ballot by legislators — along with a summary for voters to read that fibbed about “establishing term limits” and imposing a gift ban between lobbyists and legislators.

Enough voters were hoodwinked,* leading to the gutting of term limits (allowing a legislator to stay in the same seat for 16 years), the empowering of a legislature-appointed “Independent” Commission to bestow a 150 percent pay raise on legislators, and the enabling of legislators to eat every meal at the lobbyists’ trough.

Mr. Woods now faces as many as 20 years on each of 14 counts and ten more years on the money laundering conviction. Having experienced, in a previous life, the poor customer service in the federal prison system, I do not wish that on anyone.

But justice has been done.

More good news: the Arkansas Supreme Court has since ruled the entire corrupt GIF program unconstitutional . . . while Arkansas Term Limits closes in on completion of their petition drive to place a measure on this November’s ballot to restore the term limits stolen by Woods.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The measure passed 52 to 48 percent at the ballot box.

Previous coverage here of Woods’ corruption:

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Tags Arkansas, Arkansas State Senator Jon Woods, conspiracy, corruption, mail fraud, money laundering, wire fraud

crime and punishment government transparency media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies too much government

Why Paranoia

conspiracy, Northwood, Cuba, Kennedy, Parkland, shooting, crisis actors

Goofy conspiracy theories? Worth a chuckle, maybe. But not when they are about live, blood-running-in-the-street topics. Then, cries Kevin Williamson of National Review, “shame.”

Paranoia-spinners “have failed to learn the sad lesson of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” Williamson warns. “When people have come to assume that every other word out of your mouth is a lie, it becomes very difficult to tell the truth effectively.”

Well, yes. But that cuts every which way, no?

Apropos of this, comedian Dave Smith, on his most recent Part of the Problem podcast, brought up Operation Northwoods, an early-’60s clandestine false flag proposal.

“The operation proposed creating public support for a war against Cuba by blaming it for terrorist acts that would actually be perpetrated by the U.S. Government,” Wikipedia summarizes. “To this end, Operation Northwoods proposals recommended hijackings and bombings followed by the introduction of phony evidence that would implicate the Cuban government.”

This outrageous moral horror was actually signed off on by “responsible” people . . . such as the Joint Chiefs of Staff.*

“Why do these conspiracy theories persist?” Dave Smith considers, referring to the trying-too-hard conspiracy conjectures such as the now-infamous “crisis actor” hoopla. “Well, there’s . . . these conspiracies that are absolutely real — and you guys [in the media] have no interest in talking about them. And the only people who do talk about them are people like Alex Jones.”

Seeing governments lie and cover up the truth, while media too often turn blind eyes, everyday concerned folks are obviously more open to conspiracy theories.

Everyone should remember that it is the truth that will set you free.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* It was signed by Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and sent to the Secretary of Defense. President John F. Kennedy nixed it in 1962, and it was never implemented, thank goodness.

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