off-guardian | The first group of privatizations occurred in the first fascist nation, Italy, in the 1920s; and the second group of privatizations occurred in the second fascist nation,
Germany, in the 1930s. Privatizations started under Mussolini, and then
were instituted under Hitler. That got the fascist ball rolling; and,
after a few decades of hiatus in the wake of fascism’s embarrassing
supposed defeat in WW II, it resurfaced and then surged yet again after
1970, when fascist forces in the global aristocracy, such as via the
CIA, IMF, Bilderberg group, and Trilateral Commission, imposed the
global reign of the world’s main private holders of bonds and of stocks:
the world’s aristocrats are taking on an increasing percentage of what
were previously public assets.
Privatizations, after starting in fascisms during the pre-WWII years,
resumed again in the 1970s under the fascist Chilean leader Augusto
Pinochet; and in the 1980s under the fascist British leader Margaret
Thatcher (a passionate supporter of apartheid in South Africa) and also
under the smiling fascist American leader Ronald Reagan (who followed
the prior success of Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of White
domination in the by-then resurgent-conservative U.S., and might even be
said to have been America’s first fully fascist President); and in the
1990s under several fascist (formerly communist) leaders throughout the
former Soviet Union, under the guidance of Harvard University’s fascist economics department,
which transferred control from the former nomenklatura, to the new
(Western-dependent) “oligarchs,” all under the virtual guidance of its
former head, Lawrence Summers, who then was serving as the World Bank
President.
Mussolini was the man-of-the-future, but — after Franklin Delano
Roosevelt died, and finally Thatcher and Reagan and other
‘free-marketeers’ came into office — Mussolini’s “future” has
increasingly become our own “now”: the Axis Powers’ ideology has
actually been winning in the post-WW-II world. Only, this time, it’s
called instead by such names as “libertarianism” or “neo-liberalism,” no
longer “fascism,” so that only the true-believing fascists, the
aristocrats, will even know that it’s actually fascism. It’s their Big
Con. It’s their Big Lie. Just renaming fascism as “libertarianism” or
“neo-liberalism,” has fooled the masses to think that it’s
pro-democratic. “Capitalism” has thus come to be re-defined to refer to
only the aristocratically controlled form of capitalism: fascism. The
ideological battle has thus apparently been won by a cheap
terminological deceit. That’s all it takes for dictatorship to be able
to win.
The democratically controlled form of capitalism, such as in some
northern European countries, has commonly been called “socialism”; and,
of course, it’s opposed to all forms of dictatorship, both communist and
fascist. Socialism is the democratic form of capitalism. It’s not the
dictatorial form of socialism, which is Marxism. It’s the form of
capitalism that serves the public, instead of the aristocracy, at any
point where the two have conflicting interests. It subordinates the
aristocracy to the public. Fascism instead subordinates the public to
the aristocracy, which is the natural tendency (because the “World’s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67 Times as Much as World’s Poorest 68.7%,” and the “World’s Richest 80 People Own Same Amount as World’s Bottom 50%”).
espionagehistoryarchive | A notable example of the breakaway civilization in film is the 1979 film adaptation of Ian Fleming’s Moonraker. Moonraker
the film differs significantly from the Fleming’s novel, but the
differences and parallels are important to highlight: the novel focuses
on a kind of Operation Paperclip scenario, wherein
Sir Hugo Drax is secretly building a V-2 rocket in tandem with the
Nazis to destroy England and rebuild the Reich. For many, the film
adaptation a few decades later represented an exceedingly outlandish
interpolation on a pulp spy novel that failed to achieve much more than
mimicking the box office success of science-fiction blockbusters it
attempted to copy, cinematic innovations like 2001 and Star Wars.
On the contrary, more is at work here than just inserting 007 into a
Star Wars laser-battle setting. The most obvious factor to recall is
that 1979 is roughly the birth of the Strategic Defense Initiative (born
at Bohemian Grove), where plans would be posited for a DARPA-style space-based weapons system in the vein of Skynet. Thus, concurrent with this deep- state project initiated under the auspices of the Cold War showdown with the Soviets, Tesla-esque satellite decapitation and directed-energy weapon scenarios would become the Skynet/Smartgrid Internet of Things as we see it today.
In tandem with the decades early planning, predictive programming in
Hollywood blockbusters would prepare generations for the implementation
of that grid – such as ARPANET (the Internet) – in the near future.
Thus, Moonraker the film represents the second phase of the
Operation Paperclip/NASA program that birthed the rocket and “UFO/foo
fighter” aerospace technology. Taking a step back, the 1954 Fleming
book Moonraker was the first stage of the same “space program” that Moonraker the film symbolically updated, and that
is the deeper reason for the science-fiction trajectory of the
narrative. Recall as well that by the late 1970’s, 007 was already
history’s largest film franchise, so we can expect it to have been
crucial in preparatory induction for the planned technocratic age.
And so with Moonraker, the most ridiculous and silly of
007 films, all the obligatory puns and innuendos so characteristic of
the Roger Moore era serve to mask a rather profound secret of the
overall deep-state agenda. In the plot we discover that Hugo Drax has
stolen a space shuttle through his German underlings to reverse-engineer
the technology for nefarious machinations. Meanwhile, 007 is on his
trail battling the laughable Jaws (Richard Kiel) in mid-air as Jaws
loses his parachute, plummeting into no less than a circus tent. At
first, one can brush this off as pure absurdity common to the Moore era,
but comparisons to Diamonds Are Forever began to emerge, as
the circus theme of Las Vegas functioned prominently there, as well.
Both films run roughly parallel, describing the same themes and events –
a private space program that operates under various fronts and shells, intent on cornering the market under a shadow-government technocracy (SPECTRE) intent on mass depopulation and the creation of a “new world” modelled after Noah’s Ark.
In both films our respective villains also work together with the
mafia and criminal underground to achieve their designs, with the
various crime groups subservient to the overriding, internationalist SPECTRE.
Even though Drax is not a member of SPECTRE like Blofeld, the
principles he enacts are all the same. Blofeld’s jewel heist and his
casino/aerospace takeover operation perfectly mirror Drax’s
technological theft and private aerospace company, with various shells
and fronts funding the true programs of both “fictional” oligarchs. In
fact, the Moonraker facility Drax runs resembles NASA and other deep state-facilities, yet it is not the real Drax aerospace facility.
espionagehistoryarchive | We’ve analyzed 007 in the past, as well as Howard Hughes in light of Scorcese’s The Aviator,
but could there be a connection between the two? What if Ian Fleming
was encoding an explosive, real-world conspiracy involving Howard
Hughes, JFK, Aristotle Onassis and a legendary kidnapping? Not only is
there evidence to suggest this, but the film version of his 1954 novel Diamonds Are Forever
subtly suggests much more. We know Fleming was a high-level Royal Navy
psychological warfare specialist and involved in numerous covert
operations, and as I’ve argued many times, Fleming’s novels and the film
versions, in their own respective ways, elucidate these clandestine
activities, touching on everything from black-market smuggling networks
to actual espionage and assassinations.
Fleming’s inspiration for the novel stemmed from meetings and
discussions with former MI5 chief Sir Percy Stillitoe, then working for
the DeBeers diamond empire. Combined with these tips, as well
as information he received from wealthy socialite William Woodward
and Los Angeles police intelligence on organized crime and smuggling
operations, Fleming composed the fourth Bond novel in 1954 as a literary
means of detailing the dark world of precious gem and jewel markets. To
add intrigue to this already intriguing tale, Fleming was also
approached by Aristotle Onassis for a film version of either Casino Royale or Dr. No, with Onassis desiring to be a part of the funding (Ian Fleming
by Andrew Lycett, pgs. 336-7). No stranger to Hollywood, Onassis was
also a friend of numerous tinsel-town heavyweights, including the Greek
film executive Spyros Skouras.
With these connections, my thesis here, in concert with the fascinating insight of Basil Valentine, is that Diamonds Are Forever the film provides a crucial insight into the coded reference of Willard Whyte as a stand in for Howard Hughes. As I argued in my Scorcese analysis, Hughes was intimately tied to the CIA through Robert Maheu,
an intelligence-establishment figure who emerged from the CIA-dominated
advertising world. It is possible Maheu was involved in the reported
kidnapping escapade of Hughes, which TheGemstone Files allege was orchestrated by Onassis, leading to Hughes being spirited away to the magnate’s lavish island, Skorpios.
In regard to Diamonds Are Forever the 1971 film, it is a
curious note that Whyte, the Hughes stand-in, is said to have been
kidnapped and/or never emerging from his penthouse for years. As it
turns out, it is the inimical Bond villain Blofeld, and particularly
Ernst Stavro Blofeld, that is behind the
diamond smuggling plot as a means of moving in on Whyte’s aerospace
operations. If Basil’s thesis is correct, then Stavro could be a
composite of Onassis and Niarchos, the brother-in-law of Onassis and a
rival shipping magnate. Stavros Niarchos is reported to have been
counted as a Bilderberg member, as well as being a close associate of the Rockefeller Foundation for certain. These considerations are admittedly speculative.
When we consider Hughes’ close connection to the CIA through operations like Project AZORIAN,
which sounds just like a SPECTRE-style operation from a 007 film, we
can certainly presume much more was being conveyed here. Even questions
relating to the moon mission arise, given the seemingly out-of-place
shot of Bond stumbling across a sound stage in Hughes’ facility, where
actors in astronaut suits are staging a phony lunar landing. Is Fleming
implying that the moon mission itself was a psychological operation?
Speculation is welcomed here, but the real message of Diamonds centers around exotic weaponry along directed energy lines. The same theme re-emerges in the 1974 film adaptation of Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun, where alchemy and techne
combine to reveal the Pentagon’s darkest future tech. Given that Jackie
married Aristotle Onassis just five years after JFK was gone, could
this signify a mafia-mandated marriage tradition? Perhaps Fleming knew the answer about this and the real SPECTRE.
worldpoliticsreview | A potentially world-changing revelation was made last week. I am not referring to the reported breakthrough in fabricating room-temperature superconductors,
though that claim would be Nobel Prize-worthy if it overcomes the
widespread skepticism with which it was greeted. Instead, I’m talking
about the congressional hearings last Wednesday that suggested the U.S.
government possesses what used to be commonly referred to as
unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, but are now officially known as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs.
Former U.S. intelligence official David Grusch as well as naval pilots Ryan Graves and David Fravor all testified to that effect before a House Oversight subcommittee last Wednesday. Their testimony came on the heels of Grusch’s claim
last month that multiple government agencies are operating programs
aimed at recovering and analyzing UAPs, without any congressional
oversight. But last week on Capitol Hill, Grusch went even further,
maintaining that some of the UAPs the government has recovered contained
“non-human” biological material.
The three men’s testimony is the latest twist in a story that has
long trailed the Pentagon as a conspiracy theory, but took on a more
serious veneer with the release by the U.S. government in 2019, 2020 and 2021 of footage and documentation of UAPs that it had gathered over recent years. Those releases followed the revelation
in 2017 that the Pentagon had been operating the Advanced Aerospace
Threat Identification Program—a pet project of former Sen. Harry
Reid—since 2007, to investigate claims of UAPs. But while there have been other recent congressional hearings on UAPs, they did not include forceful claims of recovered crafts of extraterrestrial origin.
As with the claims about the breakthrough on superconductors,
skepticism seems warranted. The objects in question might be truly
“unidentified,” and therefore worth investigating. But Grusch’s claims
that they are of extraterrestrial origin or contained the remains of
extraterrestrial life forms is for now dubious. As Jordan Bimm, a
postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute on
the Formation of Knowledge, remarked,
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And for now,
extraordinary evidence—or any evidence, for that matter—is not
forthcoming.
Perhaps the best argument against the UAPs being or containing ETs is what one might call “the Trump Test”:
Since former President Donald Trump would have in all likelihood asked
about it during his time in office, surely he would have revealed that
the U.S. had proof of their existence if he had been told so, given his
penchant for mishandling secrets and his disdain for “deep state”
bureaucrats. Since he didn’t, the logic goes, the U.S. must not have
such proof. While it’s possible that Trump was not told the truth for
this very reason, the possibility of a large bureaucracy keeping such a secret hidden for so long is yet another reason for skepticism.
But for the sake of argument, let us suspend disbelief. What if it is
eventually confirmed that intelligent, extraterrestrial life forms have
visited Earth and continue to do so? Such a revelation would be
important and jarring in many ways, but the impact on international
politics could end up being the most profound. Three key implications
are particularly worth noting.
First, this would be a “reality-compromising event”
that could dramatically alter how citizens view and interact with their
own governments. As the political scientists Alexander Wendt and
Raymond Duvall argued,
confirmation of extraterrestrial UAPs regularly visiting earth could
raise doubts about the competency of national governments to protect
their citizens, and even the need for governments to do so. Stated
simply, if the aliens are seen as clearly superior to humans, their
sovereignty might be preferred to our own governments.
It is commonly assumed that a hostile alien invasion
will cause humankind to set aside its many divisions and make common
cause to fight it off. But that is far from certain.
This feeds what Wendt calls the “UFO taboo,”
whereby the U.S. government essentially ignores UFOs or, more
accurately, refuses to seriously entertain the possibility of alien
UFOs, at least publicly. For example, while the government does
acknowledge the existence of UAPs, it is quick to deny claims, such as those made by Grusch under oath, that they are extraterrestrial.
Second and related, confirmation of intelligent, extraterrestrial
life could alter how nation-states interact with one another. The
possibility of aliens arriving on Earth is often seen as threatening.
Indeed, the above-mentioned Pentagon program was started because UAPs
were seen as a security risk. And as Rep. Andy Ogles remarked
during last week’s hearing, “There clearly is a threat to the national
security of the United States of America. As members of Congress, we
have a responsibility to maintain oversight and be aware of these
activities so that if appropriate we take action.”
It is commonly assumed that whatever action we take to respond to
such a threat will be a cooperative global endeavor. After all, one of
the most common tropes in science fiction plots is that a hostile alien
invasion will cause humankind to set aside its many divisions and make common cause to fight it off. But that is far from certain. As the failure to coordinate global responses to the climate crisis and COVID-19 pandemic
have shown, cooperation is far from a universal response to a global
crisis. Some nations might work together to counter the alien threat.
But some could seek to protect themselves by going it alone, while
others might even align with the aliens if the latter adopt a
divide-and-conquer strategy.
Even if extraterrestrials are not directly or immediately
threatening, the revelation of their existence could still pull nations
apart, rather than bring humanity together. It is possible that the
desire to communicate with an alien civilization could spur the same cooperative spirit on display
in the International Space Station, but on a grander scale. But it is
also possible, and perhaps even likely, that governments will see it as
another arena for competition and invoke nationalism to spur efforts to
be the first to make contact, much like the space race during the 1950s
and 1960s.
Third, the arrival of intelligent extraterrestrial life would point
to one hopeful outcome for the future of humans: We may not completely
destroy ourselves.
To understand why this is the case, consider Fermi’s Paradox,
named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi. The idea is
captured in the simple question Fermi apparently voiced at lunch one
day with his colleagues at Los Alamos: “Where are they?” But the
simplicity of Fermi’s question masks a profound idea. Given the vastness of space, there must be extraterrestrials somewhere. And since some of these extraterrestrials would, like humans, want to explore space, they should have found us by now. Why haven’t they? Numerous answers have been offered, but a common one portends an ominous future for humanity: extinction.
Specifically, if alien civilizations much older and more advanced
than humans on Earth have not yet found us, then they must have
destroyed themselves before they could master interstellar space travel.
If so, what happened to those aliens could happen to humans. As
University of Manchester physicist Brian Cox opined this past week, “Maybe just ‘getting along’ as a global civilization is harder than science.”
But if, to the contrary, aliens have already visited us, then there’s
still hope for us. Fermi’s paradox would be solved, but in a way that
suggests humanity is not destined for self-destruction.
At the end of the day, all of these speculations are the result of a
thought experiment. We still lack credible evidence that the UAPs
discussed on Capitol Hill last week are from another world. This is not
to say that investigations of UAPs should be discontinued. Even if not
alien in origin, they are still in need of explanation. But that should
not distract humanity from focusing on the many problems we already face
here on Earth, of clearer origin and nature.
askapol |Last Thursday, July 27, the day after UFO whistleblower David Grusch testified before the House Oversight Committee, Ask a Polbrought
it up to Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chair Marco Rubio (R-FL)
who hadn’t caught the testimony but was quick to say he wasn’t
dismissing it.
“We’re not ignoring it,” Rubio says, adding
the Senate Intelligence Committee is trying to deal with it “in a very
different way” than their House counterparts.
Rubio also pulls the veil back a tad on his thinking as he describes the Senate focus on UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena).
“You
have to bifurcate this issue. The stuff that they're seeing over
restricted airspace, which everyone admits is real and needs to be
addressed,” Rubio says. “And then the stories about historic programs.
I mean, I don't know, that's gonna take—if that's even true—that's
gonna take a long time to unpack. And I'm not ignoring that either.”
As for if their investigation is bearing any fruit?
“Am I
getting answers? Like are people—no. We're getting a lot of information,
I'm not sure we're getting a lot of answers yet,” Rubio says. “But
these things take time.”
Japan wasn’t making earnest attempts at a reasonable surrender. It
was hoping it could get a conditional surrender where it would be able
to preserve at least some of its empire (the hyper focus on them
supposedly merely wanting assurances they could keep their Emperor is
really downplaying what they hoped to negotiate). It was still occupying
large portions of East Asia by late 1945. That was simply unacceptable
to the Allies, and very understandably so. Russia wouldn’t tolerate a
conditional surrender either, and all of Japan’s hopes at such a
negotiation were done via a Moscow that it turned out was just leading
Japan on while assembling an invasion.
“There is a school of thought, and I don’t know how well
accepted it is now, that the reason we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in August despite Japan suing for peace through non-US
diplomatic channels since IIRC April 1945 is we wanted to put the
Soviets on the back foot by showing how far we had gotten with our
nuclear program.”
There’s just no compelling historical evidence for this claim. The
paragraph following it contains the actual explanation, and in fact is
hard to square with any claims that it was a demonstration for the
Soviets. It’s hard to square on the one hand the idea that mass
casualties had been normalized, while also implying that the nukes were
viewed as a uniquely horrible thing and everyone wanted to avoid
personal responsibility while also sending a warning on the other.
The nukes were developed and deployed as an extension of the
conventional strategic bombing program. Strategic bombing was the
ultimate military fetish of the era. The Manhattan Project wasn’t the
most expensive weapons project of the war: the B-29 bomber was, costing
at least a third more. The Norden bombsight cost another 2/3 of the
total budget for the nuclear bomb, only it never worked well,
necessitating the use of mass bombing raids. Nukes were developed and
deployed as a way to effect the same level of destruction with far fewer
planes and bombs.
You could interpret the eschewing of responsibility as all the
players knowing the horror they were unleashing and trying to avoid
accountability, but another interpretation is that no one viewed the
nuclear bomb as anything other than an especially powerful explosive, so
it wasn’t something where anyone agonized over the first deployments.
There’s a lot of evidence that the military was very slow to appreciate
the uniquely dangerous aspects of nuclear weapons even after Hiroshima,
as evidenced by the cavalier attitude towards testing right through the
1950s. When the military talked about how a single atomic bomb was as
powerful as X amount of TNT, that’s genuinely how they were viewing and
using them: as an easier way to get X amount of high explosive on
target.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which was a backup target; Kokura was the
original objective) were targeted because they were significant military
targets that would have been bombed sooner or later anyway as part of
the preliminary phase for the invasion of Japan (and contrary to
revisionism that invasion was very much in the planning. In fact Japan
was counting on it and hoping to bleed it dry on the beaches in order to
force the US to agree to a conditional surrender).
Personally, I view the nukes as war crimes, but as sub-components
of the overarching war crime that was strategic bombing in general.
Ultimately there was a rationale that went into the development of the
strategic bombing concept that stretched back to the interwar years. It
turned out to be massively, horrifically wrong, but there was a coherent
thought process to it.
NYTimes | One morning in
the 1950s, Jon H. Else’s father pointed toward Nevada from their home in
Sacramento. “There was this orange glow that suddenly rose up in the
sky, and then shrank back down,” Else recalled.
It
was, hundreds of miles away, an atomic weapon test: a symbol of the
world that was created when a team of Americans led by the physicist J.
Robert Oppenheimer exploded the first nuclear bomb a decade earlier on
July 16, 1945.
Growing up in the nuclear age left an impression on Else, now 78.
He
was later a series producer of the award-winning “Eyes on the Prize,” a
program on the civil rights movement, and directed documentaries about
the Great Depression and Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. But before all that, in
1981, he made a documentary about Oppenheimer, the scientist whose bony
visage graced the covers of midcentury magazines, and the bomb. It was
called “The Day After Trinity,” a reference to that inaugural
detonation.
Decades later, viewers are
flocking to Else’s film, a nominee for the Academy Award for best
documentary feature, as a companion to Christopher Nolan’s biopic
“Oppenheimer,” which grossed more than $100 million domestically in its
opening week this month.
In a phone interview from California last
week, Else, a professor emeritus at the University of California,
Berkeley, praised Nolan’s film, which he saw last weekend in San
Francisco. (A spokeswoman for Nolan said he was not available to
comment.)
“These stories have to be retold every generation,” Else said, “and they have to be told by new storytellers.”
Nolan’s
three-hour opus, a Universal release shot on IMAX film with a lavish
cast of brand-name Hollywood actors, shares much with “The Day After
Trinity,” an 88-minute documentary financed by the public television
station in San Jose, Calif., and various grants.
theguardian |Hidden among the avalanche of documents leaked by Edward Snowden were images from a Powerpoint presentation by GCHQ, entitled The Art of Deception:
Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations. Images
include camouflaged moths, inflatable tanks, women in burqas, and
complex diagrams plastered with jargon, buzzwords and slogans:
"Disruption Operational Playbook", "Swap the real for the false and vice
versa", "People make decisions as part of groups" and, beneath a shot
of hands shuffling a deck of cards, "We want to build Cyber Magicians".
Curiously, sandwiched in the middle of the document are three
photographs of UFOs. Not real ones – classic fakes: one was a hub cap,
another a bunch of balloons, and one that turned out to be a seagull.
Devout
ufologists might seize upon this as further proof that our governments
"know something" about aliens and their transportation methods, but
really it suggests the opposite: the UFO community is a textbook case of
a gullible group susceptible to manipulation. Having spent too long
watching the skies and The X-Files, it's implied, they'll readily
swallow whatever snippet of "evidence" suits their grand theory.
If
there really is a UFO conspiracy, it's surely the worst-kept secret in
history. Roswell, Area 51, flashing lights, little green men, abductions
– it's all been fed through the pop culture mill to the point of
fatigue. Even the supposed enforcers of the secret, the "men in black",
have their own movie franchise. But a new documentary, Mirage Men,
unearths compelling evidence that UFO folklore was actually fabricated
by the US government. Rather than covering up the existence of aliens,
could it be that the real conspiracy has been persuading us to believe
in them?
Mirage Men's chief coup is to land an actual man in black: a former Air Force special investigations officer named Richard Doty, who admits to having infiltrated UFO circles. A fellow UFO researcher says: "Doty had this wonderful way to sell it – 'I'm with the government. You cooperate with us and I'm going to tell you what the government really knows about UFOs, deep down in those vaults.'" Doty and his colleagues fed credulous ufologists lies and half-truths, knowing their fertile imaginations would do the rest. In return, they were apprised of chatter from the community, thus alerting the military when anyone was getting to close to their top-secret technology. And if the Soviets thought the US really was communing with aliens, all the better.
The classic case, well-known to conspiracy aficionados, is Paul Bennewitz, a successful electronics entrepreneur in New Mexico. In 1979, Bennewitz started seeing strange lights in the sky, and picking up weird transmissions on his amateur equipment. The fact that he lived just across the road from Kirtland air force base should have set alarm bells ringing, but Bennewitz was convinced these phenomena were of extraterrestrial origin. Being a good patriot, he contacted the Air Force, who realised that, far from eavesdropping on ET, Bennewitz was inadvertently eavesdropping on them. Instead of making him stop, though, Doty and other officers told Bennewitz they were interested in his findings. That encouraged Bennewitz to dig deeper. Within a few years, he was interpreting alien languages, spotting crashed alien craft in the hills from his plane (he was an amateur pilot), and sounding the alert for a full-scale invasion. All the time, the investigators were surveilling him surveilling them. They gave Bennewitz computer software that "interpreted" the signals, and even dumped fake props for him to discover. The mania took over Bennewitz's life. In 1988, his family checked him into a psychiatric facility.
There's plenty more like this. As Mirage Men discovers, central tenets of the UFO belief system turn out to have far earthlier origins. Mysterious cattle mutilations in 1970s New Mexico turn out to have been officials furtively investigating radiation in livestock after they'd conducted an ill-advised experiment in underground "nuclear fracking". Test pilots for the military's experimental silent helicopters admit to attaching flashing lights to their craft to fool civilians. Doty himself comes across as a slippery character, to say the least. "He remains an absolute enigma," says Mark Pilkington, writer of the book Mirage Men, the basis for the documentary. He found the retired Doty working as a traffic cop in a small New Mexico town. "Some of what he said was true and I'm sure a lot of it wasn't, or was a version of the truth. I have no doubt Rick was at the bottom of a ladder that stretches all the way to Washington. It's unclear to what extent he was following orders and to what taking matters into his own hands."
Doty almost admits to having had a hand in supposedly leaked "classified" documents, such as the "Majestic 12" dossier – spilling the beans on a secret alien liaison committee founded by President Truman. But he denies involvement in the "Project Serpo" papers – which claimed that 12 American military personnel paid a secret visit to an alien planet in the Zeta Reticuli system – only to be caught out as the source of the presumed hoax. The Serpo scenario, it has been noted, is not unlike the plot of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Does that suggest that the forgers lazily copied the movie? Or that the movie is based on real events and Spielberg was in on the conspiracy?
responsiblestatecraft | On July 16, 1945, the world ended. Or at least it seemed that way to residents of the Tularosa Basin in New Mexico.
Unbeknownst to local civilians, J. Robert Oppenheimer had chosen
their backyard as the proving ground for the world’s first nuclear
weapon. The explosion, which U.S. officials publicly claimed to be an
accident at a local ammunition depot, tore through the morning sky,
leaving a 40,000-foot-tall cloud of radioactive debris that would cake
the surrounding area with dust for days on end.
Tina Cordova, whose hometown of Tularosa lies just 45 miles from
ground zero, remembers her grandmother’s stories about wiping that
infernal dust off every nook and cranny of her childhood home. No one
knew what had happened quite yet, but they figured it must have been
something special. After all, a local paper reported that the explosion was so bright that a blind woman had actually seen it.
When the initial shock wore off, the 40,000 locals who lived within
50 miles of ground zero returned to their daily lives. They drank from
cisterns full of radioactive debris, ate beef from cattle that had
grazed on the dust for weeks on end, and breathed air full of tiny
plutonium particles. Only later would the real impact become clear.
Bernice Gutierrez, born just eight days before Oppenheimer’s “Trinity
Test,” moved from a small town near the blast site to Albuquerque when
she was 2 years old. Cancer followed her like a specter. Her great
grandfather died of stomach cancer in the early 1950s. She lost cousins
to leukemia and pancreatic cancer. Her oldest son died in 2020 after a
bout with a “pre-leukemia” blood disorder. In total, 21 members of
Gutierrez’s family have had cancer, and seven have died from it.
“We don’t ask ourselves if we’re gonna get cancer,” Gutierrez told RS. “We ask ourselves when, because it just never ends.”
“Oppenheimer” — the latest film from famed director Christopher Nolan
— is a three-hour-long exploration of the “dilettante, womanizer,
Communist sympathizer,” and world-historic genius behind the ultimate
weapon. The movie, based on the book “American Prometheus,” delves
deeply into Oppenheimer’s psyche, from his struggles as a young student
at Cambridge to his profound melancholy over the world he helped create.
Yet nowhere in the film will viewers find an acknowledgement of the
first victims of the nuclear era. Indeed, the movie repeats the myth
that the bomb site was in a desolate area with “nothing for 40 miles in
either direction.” This was not for lack of effort, according to
Cordova, who leads an activist group called the Tularosa Basin
Downwinders Consortium. (“Downwinders” refers to those who live in the
fallout zone of nuclear tests.)
When Nolan’s team got to New Mexico to film, Cordova and her team published an op-ed
in the local newspaper that called on the Oppenheimer crew to “grapple
with the consequences of confronting the truth of our stories, of our
history.” When that didn’t work, she reached out to the production
through Kai Bird, the journalist who co-wrote American Prometheus, in an
attempt to get a meeting. She received a flat “no.”
jacobin | his isn’t
the only major revelation that has come out of President Joe Biden’s
December declassification. One is a secret 1977 memo unearthed
by Morley and other researchers that was written by an employee of the
foreign intelligence branch of the CIA’s Miami station, showing that far
from assuming that Oswald acted alone or that the KGB was involved,
officers there considered anti-communist Cuban exiles prime suspects.
According to the memo,
when Kennedy was still alive, station chief Theodore G. Shackley
ordered scrutiny of the movements and plans of “known dangerous Cuban
exile activists” while the president was traveling the country, to get
wind of and halt any “conspiracies” in that community to “exploit or
interfere with the president’s movement.” After Kennedy’s death, the
memo states, Shackley and other top station officials ordered agents to
gather information about Cuban exiles who may have been involved in the
assassination.
Sure enough, the decades that followed have seen serious
circumstantial evidence of anti-Castro exile involvement come to light.
One anti-Castro militant, Antonio Veciana, admitted that he had been
introduced to Oswald in Dallas by his CIA handler, a man whom he later identified
as David Atlee Phillips, head of the agency’s anti-Cuban operations. In
late 2021, the son of anti-Castro fighter and CIA contractor Ricardo
“Monkey” Morales revealed
that his father had told him that he had trained Oswald as a sniper at a
secret CIA training camp for an invasion of Cuba, and that he had been
ordered by his CIA handler to go to Dallas for a “clean-up” mission two
days before Kennedy was shot.
Another document from the December tranche found by researchers is a 1976 CIA memo
attesting to the agency’s heavy involvement in the Warren Commission’s
investigation. According to the memo, thirty-nine CIA personnel were
involved, including “nine of whom were involved daily.” As Morley pointed out
at the time, several of those listed in the memo are known to have
misled the Warren Commission about the CIA’s interest in and knowledge
of Oswald.
It’s further evidence of what even the agency’s own in-house historian in 2013 charitably called
a “benign cover-up” by the CIA in its dealings with the commission,
aimed at pushing it in the direction of what it considered the “best
truth” — that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy, for his own,
inexplicable motives.
It builds on previous disclosures that show
that the CIA had a keen and extensive interest in Oswald before the
assassination that went right up to the agency’s senior officials.
Camp Century was a preliminary camp for Project Iceworm whose end goal was to install a vast network of nuclear missile launch sites that could survive a first strike. This was according to documents declassified in 1996.[4] The missiles were never fielded and necessary consent from the Danish Government to do so was never broached.
The camp operated from 1959 until 1967. It consisted of 21
tunnels with a total length of 9,800 feet (3.0 km), and was powered by a
nuclear reactor.
Project Iceworm was aborted after it was realized that the ice sheet
was not as stable as originally assessed, and that the missile basing
concept would not be feasible. The reactor was removed and Camp Century
later abandoned. However, hazardous waste remains buried under the ice
and has become an environmental concern.[5]
Scientific research
Ice core samples from Camp Century were used to create stable isotopes analyses used to develop climate models.[6][7][8]
Analysis of soil contained in the samples suggests that the site was
ice-free as recently as 400,000 years ago, indicating a much reduced Greenland ice sheet and therefore much higher sea levels.[9]
Since 2017, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland has
maintained a climate monitoring presence at Camp Century with the Camp
Century Climate Monitoring Program.[10]
This monitoring presence includes measuring climate variables, snow and
ice temperatures, and ice-penetrating radar surveys of the subsurface
debris and contaminant field.
History
The purpose of Camp Century, as explained by the United States Department of Defense
to Danish officials in 1960, was to test various construction
techniques under Arctic conditions, explore practical problems with the PM-2A semi-mobile nuclear reactor, as well as supporting scientific experiments on the icecap.
The camp ran until 1967, when shifting icecaps made habitation
impossible. The camp was subsequently abandoned and the facility's
remains were buried by the icecaps and ultimately crushed.[12]
Camp Century was designed as an arctic subsurface camp and
constructed by use of the cut-and-cover trenching technique. The layout
of the camp consisted of a series of parallel main trenches in which
buildings and other structures were housed. The camp had a design life
span of 10 years with appropriate maintenance. It was permanently manned
for 5 years and abandoned after 8 years.[13]
The trenches constructed in 1959 had compressed both vertically
and horizontally to the extent that many had reached their design
margins within 4 years. After that, extensive snow trimming was required
to maintain the trenches.[14]
The trenches were covered with a steel arch and the longest trench had a
length of 1,100 feet (340 m), while its width and height were both 26
feet.[12]
The subsurface camp provided good protection from the elements
and had modern bathroom, dining, and medical facilities. Prefabricated
buildings were placed inside the trenches.[2]
The camp maintained a number of vehicles and had plenty of storage for
fuel and food. The reactor provided plenty of power and proved it could
be installed, operated, and removed in such a remote location. It
powered the base for over 3 years but was shut down due to the
unexpected accelerated compression of the reactor trenches, in part due
to the residual heat in the reactor area required to maintain the feed
water pools.
In this video the author describes the "Un-American Activities" trial where Oppenheimer lost his
Q clearance. On the first day of the trial, Oppenheimer is extremely
dismayed when he discovers that the Chairman of the trial is none other
than Gordon Gray, one of the original Majestic Twelve. Parts of the
trial are highly classified, and the attorney-client privilege between
Oppenheimer and his lawyers is comprised via wiretap. Later in life,
Oppenheimer always said "There's a story within a story" regarding revocation of his security clearance.
Really
insightful viewing coming on the heels of Schumer's revelation that the
Atomic Energy Act 1954 is being used to improperly keep UFO data
permanently classified.
Here are some highlights timestamped:
Attorney-client privilege tapped: 35:00
Canadian UFO scientist Wilbert Smith & Robert Sarbacher: 38:30
Oil industry destroyed if new technology revealed: 50:50
Gordon Gray MJ-12: 52:29
Gray's papers on Oppenheimer in Eisenhower Library "never to be released": 56:30
General Leslie Groves no longer trusted Oppenheimer (why?): 59:45
Oppenheimer states "a great deal happened between 1945-49" (i.e. Roswell etc.)
John
von Neumann testified about "a new Buck Rogers reality" (remembering
that when he was in hospital dying of aggressive cancer, an armed
military guard on watch 24/7 in case von Neumann revealed any "secrets")
: 1:06
Oppenheimer states "There's a story within the story" : 1:10:35
Propulsion systems: 1:13:40
Executive Orders create the secrets, not the Congress: 1:15:30
popularmechanics | President Joe Biden has announced that he has completed his “final certification” of files to be released regarding John F. Kennedy’s assassination, even though 4,684 documents are still kept secret in whole or in part.
The
National Archives has already released thousands of confidential
documents related to the November 1963 assassination of then-president
Kennedy. The documents include information from the CIA, FBI,
State Department, and other agencies on topics such as assassin Lee
Harvey Oswald’s contacts with Soviet and Cuban officials, anonymous tips
and threats, and investigations into the shooting itself.
One of the newly released documents revealed the name of the CIA
official who intercepted Oswald’s mail in the months before JFK’s
killing: Reuben Efron. It turns out Efron had a UFO encounter in 1955
when he was on a train journey through the Soviet Union with Senator
Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia, and an Army colonel. They all saw what a CIA report
called two “flying saucers,” though skeptics later argued that they
were Soviet aircraft. Russell was among the Warren Commission members
who interviewed Marina Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife, in 1964.
Some conspiracy theorists see a connection
between Efron and the Kennedy assassination and wonder if he knew more
than he let on. They also hope that a bipartisan bill to declassify UFO records will reveal more about the government’s knowledge and involvement in unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).
“People say there’s nothing significant in these files?” Jefferson Morley, the editor of the blog JFK Facts, told The New York Times.
“Bingo! Here’s the guy who was reading Oswald’s mail, a detail they
failed to share until now. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to
think it’s suspicious.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is backing a bipartisan bill that would unveil government records on so-called UFOs
and unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). The bill would amend the
National Defense Authorization Act and require the federal government to
compile all records on UAPs and share them with the public, unless a
review board justifies keeping them secret.
amazon | How was it possible that J. Robert Oppenheimer - national hero, director of the Manhattan Project, brilliant physicist, sometimes impatient and abrasive personality - summarily lost his security clearance in 1954? How could this anything-but-secret leftist have been trusted by his government with the celebrated "Q-clearance" for more than a decade, from 1942 to 1954, granting him access to the highest levels of top secret information regarding nuclear weapons, then have his clearance summarily stripped from him because his loyalty came suddenly into doubt?
The traditional historical explanation is too facile to be believed. It holds that, first, the fact that Oppenheimer was a leftist student at Berkeley in the Thirties was not seen as particularly important in 1942 when he was hired to become (as he later did) "Father of the Atomic Bomb." After all, who hadn't been a leftist intellectual during those years? Then we are required to believe that in 1954 the government, armed now with insights acquired from Joe McCarthy and others, could see clearly the danger to the Republic these former college kids represented. No matter that Oppenheimer actually led - and successfully protected - arguably one of the greatest secrets of the Twentieth Century. Oppenheimer (as he was called) had to be humiliated. He had been a leftist in the Thirties!
Here's why that explanation doesn't hold: It is an undisputed fact that Oppenheimer had been called back into government service many times after 1945, and continued to enjoy the the access provided by his Top Secret clearance. The reasons for his having been called may still be shrouded in official government secrecy, but we know he was called often during the years 1945 to 1954. Therefore the questions about his loyalty didn't evolve with changing American sensibilities; they came suddenly, and without warning.
In UFO Secrecy and the Fall of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Dr. Burleson constructs and defends a surprising hypothesis to explain Oppenheimer's fall from grace. It boils down to two parts: First, that he was involved in more than one UFO retrieval effort between 1947 and 1954; then, that in 1954 he was in fact being punished by others in the select circle of those with access to classified information about UFOs.
Burleson makes an effective case to link and then support the two parts of his hypothesis. In order to do this, however, he must first work a kind of magic: He needs to put Oppenheimer conclusively on the scene of at least one government-sponsored UFO retrieval project. It doesn't matter if you're a UFO skeptic or not; that's a tall order! The government, after all, has picked up lots of debris, but denies to this day the existence of any retrievals still classified as UFOs. So how does Burleson prove the government is not being truthful?
I really don't want to tell you because I don't want to risk detracting from Dr. Burleson's detailed recital of the facts. But all right. Suffice it to say Burleson does not benefit from anyone's betrayal of government secrecy, nor does he make any tenuous inferential claims. His information comes directly from a Canadian source pertaining to a specific 1947 crash and retrieval effort - information shared at the time by both governments. The memorandum in question was declassified by the Canadian government in 1978 (for shame!) and has been in the public domain since that time. In short, Burleson makes the essential connection by relying on a skill that is sadly wanting among historians and journalists today: Pure scholarship.
Burleson is able to lay out all the subsequent known facts into a far more compelling historical narrative than any of the conventional accounts we have seen to date. He details the historical record of people now known to be connected to Oppenheimer through their connections to the event. This leads in turn to a far more plausible historical account of events leading up to Oppenheimer's clearance hearing in 1954. It puts Oppenheimer in touch, unfortunately, with people well known for their skill at backbiting, bureaucratic infighting, and the shallow envy of those who were simply not in in a league with Oppenheimer.
Whether you come to the book as a believer in UFOs with extraterrestrial origins or not, you will have to concede that Dr. Burleson defends his Oppenheimer-UFO hypothesis with outstanding success. He cuts into the shell of secrecy by providing by far the best and most plausible explanation for a set of facts that themselves are not seriously in dispute. Consider Burleson's Oppenheimer-UFO hypothesis, therefore, confirmed.
SEC. 10. DISCLOSURE OF RECOVERED TECHNOLOGIES OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN AND BIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE OF NON-HUMAN INTELLIGENCE.
(a) EXERCISE OF EMINENT DOMAIN
The
Federal Government shall exercise eminent domain over any and all
recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of
non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or
entities in the interests of the public good.
Number 4): Legislation is necessary because credible evidence and testimony indicates that Federal Government unidentified anomalous phenomena records exist that have not been declassified or subject to mandatory classification review as set forth in Executive Order 13526 due in part to exemptions under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as well as an overbroad interpretation of "transclassified foreign nuclear information", which is also exempt from mandatory declassification, thereby preventing public disclosure under existing provisions of law.
1954 is the year Oppenheimer was relieved of his Q clearance. I
don't want to overstep the possibilities here, but this is huge.
Legislation
is necessary to create an enforceable, independent, and accountable
process for the disclosure of such records. Legislation is necessary
because credible evidence
and testimony indicates that Federal Government Unidentified Anomalous
Phenomena records exist that have not been declassified or subject to
mandatory classification review as set forth in executive order 13526
due in part to exemptions under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as well
as an over broad interpretation of "trans classified foreign nuclear
information", which is also exempt from mandatory classification,
thereby preventing public disclosure under existing provisions of law.
This bill states that there's credible evidenceandtestimony
(note: *not* simply testimony) that the government has been hiding
stuff they're mandated to disclose by claiming it's exempt under the
"Atomic Energy Act of 1954" or is exempt due to an overly-broad
interpretation of "transclassified foreign nuclear information."
And later on page 12, look who we find is mentioned in a list of entities who have had anomalous materials that was created or made available for use by, obtained by, or otherwise came into the possession of
The Department of Energy and its pro-genitors, the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Energy Research and Development Administration;
wikipedia | The Robertson Panel first met formally on January 14, 1953 under the direction of Howard P. Robertson.
He was a physicist, a CIA consultant, and the director of the Defense
Department Weapons Evaluation Group. He was instructed by OSI to
assemble a group of prominent scientists to review the Air Force's UFO
files. In preparation for this, Robertson first personally reviewed Air
Force files and procedures. The Air Force had recently commissioned the
Battelle Memorial Institute to scientifically study all of the UFO
reports collected by Project Sign, Project Grudge
and Project Blue Book. Robertson hoped to draw on their statistical
results, but Battelle insisted that they needed much more time to
conduct a proper study. Other panel members were respected scientists
who had worked on other classified military projects or studies. All
were then skeptical of UFO reports, though to varying degrees. Apart
from Robertson, the panel included:
J. Allen Hynek, astronomer and consultant to Blue Book presented to the panel, but was not a full member.[15]
Most of what is known about the actual proceedings of the meetings
comes from notes kept by Durant which were later submitted as a memo to
the NSC and commonly referred to as the Durant Report.[2] In addition, various participants would later comment on what transpired from their perspective. Captain (later Major) Edward Ruppelt, then head of Project Blue Book, first revealed the existence of the secret panel in his 1956 book,[4] but without revealing names of panel members.
As early as August 15 CIA analysts, despite their overall skeptical conclusions had noted, "Sightings of UFOs reported at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, at a time when the background radiation
count had risen inexplicably. Here we run out of even "blue yonder"
explanations that might be tenable, and, we still are left with numbers
of incredible reports from credible observers."[11]
On December 2, 1952 CIA Assistant Director Chadwell noted, "Recent
reports reaching CIA indicated that further action was desirable and
another briefing by the cognizant A-2 and ATIC personnel was held on 25
November. At this time, the reports of incidents convince us that there
is something going on that must have immediate attention. The details of
some of these incidents have been discussed by AD/SI with DDCI.
Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at
high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of
such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known
types of aerial vehicles".[12]
Chadwell's 2 December memorandum contained the draft of recommendations for the NSC, which were:
1. The Director of Central Intelligence shall formulate
and carry out a program of intelligence and research activities as
required to solve the problem of instant positive identification of
unidentified flying objects.
2. Upon call of the Director of Central Intelligence, Government
departments and agencies shall provide assistance in this program of
intelligence and research to the extent of their capacity provided,
however, that the DCI shall avoid duplication of activities presently
directed toward the solution of this problem.
3. This effort shall be coordinated with the military services
and the Research and Development Board of the Department of Defense,
with the Psychological Board and other Governmental agencies as
appropriate.
4. The Director of Central Intelligence shall disseminate information
concerning the program of intelligence and research activities in this
field to the various departments and agencies which have authorized
interest therein.""[12]
On December 4, 1952 the Intelligence Advisory Committee agreed:
The Director of Central Intelligence will:
a. Enlist the services of selected scientists to review and
appraise the available evidence in the light of pertinent scientific
theories.
b. Draft and circulate to the IAC a proposed NSCID, which would signify
the IAC concerning the subject and authorize coordination with
appropriate non-IAC departments and agencies.[1]
From the IAC minutes of December 4 and the earlier CIA documents it
appears clear that the Robertson Panel was the outcome of recommendation
(a) of the IAC decision but that this formed part of a wider intended
programme of action aimed at enabling rapid positive identification of
UFOs from an air defense perspective (i.e. identifying actual Soviet
aircraft from misidentified natural phenomena or other conventional
objects) and a desire to reduce reporting of UFOs, which were seen as
clogging up air defense communication channels and created the risk of
exploitation of this effect. The inter-relationships between these wider
aspects of the CIA's recommendations and the Battelle Memorial Institute's study, culminating in Blue Book Special Report 14,[13]
which identified a statistically significant difference between
'unknowns' and UFO reports that could subsequently be identified, or the
study group referenced in a Canadian government document as operating
as early as 1950 under the chairmanship of Dr Vannevar Bush, then head of the Joint Research and Development Board, to discover the 'modus operandi' of UFOs[14] are unclear.
NYTimes | When Jimmy Kimmel asked Hillary Clinton in a late-night TV interview about U.F.O.s, she quickly corrected his terminology.
“You
know, there’s a new name,” Mrs. Clinton said in the March appearance.
“It’s unexplained aerial phenomenon,” she said. “U.A.P. That’s the
latest nomenclature.”
Known for her
grasp of policy, Mrs. Clinton has spoken at length in her presidential
campaign on topics as diverse as Alzheimer’s research and military
tensions in the South China Sea. But it is her unusual knowledge about
extraterrestrials that has struck a small but committed cohort of
voters.
Mrs. Clinton has vowed that
barring any threats to national security, she would open up government
files on the subject, a shift from President Obama, who typically
dismisses the topic as a joke. Her position has elated U.F.O.
enthusiasts, who have declared Mrs. Clinton the first “E.T. candidate.”
“Hillary has embraced this issue with an absolutely unprecedented level of interest in American politics,” said Joseph G. Buchman, who has spent decades calling for government transparency about extraterrestrials.
Mrs.
Clinton, a cautious candidate who often bemoans being the subject of
Republican conspiracy theories, has shown surprising ease plunging into
the discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial beings.
She has said in recent interviews that as president she would release information about Area 51,
the remote Air Force base in Nevada believed by some to be a secret hub
where the government stores classified information about aliens and
U.F.O.s.
In a radio interview
last month, she said, “I want to open the files as much as we can.”
Asked if she believed in U.F.O.s, Mrs. Clinton said: “I don’t know. I
want to see what the information shows.” But she added, “There’s enough
stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their
kitchen making them up.”
When asked about extraterrestrials in an interview with The Conway Daily Sun in New Hampshire last year, Mrs. Clinton promised to “get to the bottom of it.”
“I think we may have been” visited already, she said in the interview. “We don’t know for sure.”
While
Americans typically point to issues like the economy and terrorism as
top priorities for the next president, a desire for answers about aliens
has inspired a passionate bloc of voters, who make their voices heard
on social media.
Stephen Bassett, who lobbies the government
on extraterrestrial issues, views a Clinton presidency as a chance to
finally get the United States to disclose all it knows about life beyond
Earth. Since November 2014, Mr. Bassett’s organization has sent roughly
2.5 million Twitter messages to presidential candidates, elected
officials and the news media urging a serious discussion of the issue.
“That was a storm, and now it’s like a steady drip,” Mr. Bassett said.
The
movement viewed Mrs. Clinton’s decision to correct Mr. Kimmel’s use of
the term U.F.O., which some view as loaded and rooted more in science
fiction than in science, as a breakthrough because it “suggested she’d
been briefed by someone and is not just being flippant,” Mr. Buchman
said.
In fact, Mrs. Clinton had been
briefed. She was prepped by her campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, who
is not only a well-respected Washington hand, having served as a top
adviser to Mr. Obama and President Bill Clinton, but also a crusader
for the disclosure of government information on unexplained phenomena
that could prove the existence of intelligent life outside Earth.
“The
time to pull back the curtain on the topic is long overdue,” Mr.
Podesta wrote in his foreword for the 2010 book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots
and Government Officials Go on the Record,” by Leslie Kean, an
investigative journalist.
Mrs.
Clinton’s position is not a political response to public sentiment — 63
percent of Americans do not believe in U.F.O.s, according to an
Associated Press poll. But it reflects the decades of overlap between
the rise to power of Bill and Hillary Clinton and popular culture’s
obsession with the universe’s most mysterious questions.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
Japan wasn’t making earnest attempts at a reasonable surrender. It was hoping it could get a conditional surrender where it would be able to preserve at least some of its empire (the hyper focus on them supposedly merely wanting assurances they could keep their Emperor is really downplaying what they hoped to negotiate). It was still occupying large portions of East Asia by late 1945. That was simply unacceptable to the Allies, and very understandably so. Russia wouldn’t tolerate a conditional surrender either, and all of Japan’s hopes at such a negotiation were done via a Moscow that it turned out was just leading Japan on while assembling an invasion.
There’s just no compelling historical evidence for this claim. The paragraph following it contains the actual explanation, and in fact is hard to square with any claims that it was a demonstration for the Soviets. It’s hard to square on the one hand the idea that mass casualties had been normalized, while also implying that the nukes were viewed as a uniquely horrible thing and everyone wanted to avoid personal responsibility while also sending a warning on the other.
The nukes were developed and deployed as an extension of the conventional strategic bombing program. Strategic bombing was the ultimate military fetish of the era. The Manhattan Project wasn’t the most expensive weapons project of the war: the B-29 bomber was, costing at least a third more. The Norden bombsight cost another 2/3 of the total budget for the nuclear bomb, only it never worked well, necessitating the use of mass bombing raids. Nukes were developed and deployed as a way to effect the same level of destruction with far fewer planes and bombs.
You could interpret the eschewing of responsibility as all the players knowing the horror they were unleashing and trying to avoid accountability, but another interpretation is that no one viewed the nuclear bomb as anything other than an especially powerful explosive, so it wasn’t something where anyone agonized over the first deployments. There’s a lot of evidence that the military was very slow to appreciate the uniquely dangerous aspects of nuclear weapons even after Hiroshima, as evidenced by the cavalier attitude towards testing right through the 1950s. When the military talked about how a single atomic bomb was as powerful as X amount of TNT, that’s genuinely how they were viewing and using them: as an easier way to get X amount of high explosive on target.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which was a backup target; Kokura was the original objective) were targeted because they were significant military targets that would have been bombed sooner or later anyway as part of the preliminary phase for the invasion of Japan (and contrary to revisionism that invasion was very much in the planning. In fact Japan was counting on it and hoping to bleed it dry on the beaches in order to force the US to agree to a conditional surrender).
Personally, I view the nukes as war crimes, but as sub-components of the overarching war crime that was strategic bombing in general. Ultimately there was a rationale that went into the development of the strategic bombing concept that stretched back to the interwar years. It turned out to be massively, horrifically wrong, but there was a coherent thought process to it.