A day of reflection — and from a few years ago — “Honor and Horror.”
Categories
Memorial Day 2023
Tag: military
“Ruling out aliens? Senior U.S. general says not ruling out anything yet,” ran the Reuters headline. This was over the weekend, “after a series of shoot-downs of unidentified objects,” Reuters explained, clarifying that for the real information, General Glen VanHerck would defer “to U.S. intelligence experts.”
You know, the people who start wars under false pretenses and hounded a sitting president with a fake dossier about bed-wetting prostitutes.
While General VanHerck simultaneously up-played and down-played extra-terrestrials, an unnamed source at the Pentagon denied any evidence for the crafts being anything but terrestrial. Sure. But remember the context: last week’s 200-foot-tall balloon episode.
“To be clear — The Chinese Balloon was an authentic UFO until it was identified,” tweeted Neil deGrasse Tyson. “It then became an IFO.”
I riffed off that truism when I covered the balloon story, too. But does that explain how quickly a balloon panic became a UFO panic?
Ever since World War II’s foo fighters we’ve had hints that something was not completely “normal” in our skies. But the military has never before boasted of shooting down UFOs — though ufology lore is full of stories about just such events.
VanHerck offers a possible explanation: after the balloon brouhaha, the radar tracking systems were reset to include things less jet-like and rocket-like than normal. So other things in the skies that seem anomalous — foo-fighter-like? — all of a sudden become serious concerns.
This was one of the reasons given for the founding of modern Pentagon tracking of “UAP”: there may be more than one type of strange “phenomena” flying/floating/darting-about in our skies, and the military should be able to distinguish one from another, especially from novel drone and other surveillance technology.
Especially in time of war.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
Categories
Now A Straight Answer?
Last week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “America’s civil space program and the global leader in space exploration,” got in on the UFO disclosure racket.
Why that word, “racket”?
UFO skeptics and mockers have been using that sort of word to describe the subject itself — unidentified advanced aerial phenomena on the planet — but now we hear UFO “nuts” useit to describe NASA’s announcement.
“A crock,” says Tyler Glockner of the popular SecureTeam10 channel, reminding us of NASA’s nickname: “Never A Straight Answer.”
Many UFO researchers believe that NASA has been “in” on “the UFO cover-up” from the beginning of its mission.
I know nothing about that, but I do know that we cannot trust government.
While rumors about NASA programs to scrub photos of the Moon and Mars to get rid of alien structures on the surfaces of those two bodies, as well as alien craft, are outlandish, so to speak — it surely looks like something is going on regarding UFOs.
While NASA insists that it “is not part of the Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force or its successor, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group,” which have so far dominated recent UFO news headlines, it does proclaim that it is coordinating with other agencies.
More significantly, physicist Michio Kaku recently changed his tune on UFOs, and is talking of an independent research group that confirms the physical reality of UFOs darting about with advanced physical attributes.
Not new, I know: same thing French scientist Jacques Vallee wrote in the 1960s, and General Twining apparently memo’ed in the ’40s.
In covering this issue for the last few years, my point has been: government transparency. Let’s remember the long history of government agencies stringing us opaquely along.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
U.S. Senator Ron Johnson’s aim, in moderating a panel discussion last week, was to provide, in his words, a “long-overdue second opinion” on the coronavirus pandemic. The senior senator from Wisconsin gathered a wide variety of experts who offered up a lot of information.
Included in the nearly five hours of material is some startling information — data derived from military personnel and their families.
You may remember that the current president has made the “vaccines” mandatory for the military. Well, Ohio attorney Thomas Renz “presented DOD medical billing data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) that paints a shockingly disturbing picture of the health of our service members in 2021,” writes Daniel Horowitz for Blaze.
What was found?
- A massive 300% increase in DMED codes registered for miscarriages in the military
- Cancer diagnoses: up nearly 300%
- Diagnosis codes for neurological issues: up 1000%
- Bell’s palsy: 291% increase
- Female infertility: up 471%
- Pulmonary embolisms: 467% increase
- Congenital malformations: 156% rise
Now, these do not represent individual cases, but specific diagnoses, which can be multiple for each patient. Still: alarming.
And in case you might wonder about blaming COVID itself for some of these, consider the miscarriage rate: it was normal in 2020, before the vaccines, and it spiked in 2021, with the vaccines.
These rate increases were based on data going back five years prior to 2021.
While these issues need to be fully addressed, the sad truth is that approved, official government personnel and the pro-vax “expert” authorities declined to participate in the Wisconsin Republican’s hearing.
More evidence that the pandemic has become a partisan issue, with Democrats pushing the official narrative.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
“[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.
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
While one segment of the voting public regards President Donald Trump as a heaven-sent savior, a louder mob treats Trump as the Beast, a veritable Anti-Obama.
I am in neither tribe.
To me, Mr. Trump must be judged on what he does. Nominating Neil Gorsuch? A-plus. But The Donald has also reneged on a number of important campaign promises, not the least being his pledge to “eliminate the national debt in eight years.”
Sure, it was never quite believable. But is this administration even making progress?
If all goes according to the new plan, “the country would run a deficit of $631 billion in 2025,” writes Eric Boehm. That is not much of an improvement over Barack Obama’s final-year deficit of $666 billion.
Boehm’s Reason article is titled “Trump’s Budget Would Add $7.9 Trillion to the National Debt Over the Next Decade,” which gives a serious picture of Trump’s under-performance.
Now, you could react to the news and just say “less than $8 trillion — could be worse!”
But by accepting such a high number, we set the bar awfully low. It just isn’t serious.
And speaking of frivolity, it is “hard to take the president’s calls for belt-tightening seriously,” Boehm writes, “when the cuts only apply to some parts of the federal budget.”
You can guess which part of government is being given a free pass. Trump’s team is attempting to hide something: “spending increases for the Pentagon.”
Now, if American foreign policy were not the incoherent mess it is, we might make excuses.
But it is.
Serious Americans would exempt no part of the budget from intense scrutiny.
And real cuts.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)