The Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare – his real title – stated on June 20th this year:
“Navy officials did indeed meet with interested congressional members and staffers on Wednesday to provide a classified brief on efforts to understand and identify these threats to the safety and security of our aviators.”
Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, said: “I did have one very brief meeting on it, but people are saying they’re seeing UFO’s, do I believe it? Not particularly.”
Just a few weeks later, an ostensible joke post on Facebook went viral. Currently, 1.8 million people have signed up to naruto run and storm area 51 to see them aliens.
This is set for September 20th. Whether they will actually go ahead with it, remains to be seen, but if they do, well it would be the carnival of dissent.
We can already picture it. Divas singing songs while dressed so very colorfully. Furies with their usually super cool costumes. Star War fans and all other basement nerds. America, perhaps at its best.
We doubt the navy would allow them anywhere near area 51. They might have to call in the army though. If they do naruto run, we doubt the army would use actual force. Presuming, that is, an American army is protecting the area.
Plenty can be said about the “elected” donkeys, but the soldiers and the marines and much of the rest do a very difficult job and are usually true patriots sworn to protect liberty.
They might put up fences or whatever and utilize largely peaceful crowd control methods. Anything else would be a very dangerous escalation.
Not that the soldiers themselves necessarily know just what goes on inside there. They may well stand down. Moreover since these would be people from all over America, and maybe even all over the world, no soldier brought from any region of America would know whether their brother or sister is in the crowd.
Nor would they necessarily know what exactly they’re protecting. In matters of military, of course secrecy can often be necessary, but that can conflict with the need of the people to exercise oversight on our governments.
That classified briefing to senators and the president is one way such tension between the need for secrecy and the need for oversight can be addressed.
Another way might be to allow journalists to enter the premises so that the public can have a somewhat concrete and realistic idea of what’s going on in there, while of course what absolutely must be kept secret is kept secret.
Otherwise as they say there’s no smoke without fire. It’s unclear how many people work in there, but secrets are usually difficult to keep unless the secret is worth keeping. That is unless it does actually have something to do with protecting the public, rather than protecting the public from knowing what it should know.
Naruto Dem Aliens
It is both fascinating and childish to think them aliens where able to travel so far, and still somehow ended up in some secluded heavily guarded area.
You’d think they’d know as much as to not go anywhere near it and land instead anywhere else but there.
Yet folklore usually speaks in metaphor. They probably don’t mean literal aliens. They probably mean very smart people at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge work there to create very advanced tech which has not been made available to the public even though the public pays for it through taxes.
We doubt Nakamoto is one of those people. He, they, or maybe even the alien as it may well be, is probably from a completely different field than flying objects.
Some entertainment based fascination is arising though with bitcoin and time travel. You’d think as bitcoin is the only invention so far that is easily accessible to the public and has gained such an immense amount of value, if there was time travel and bitcoin still exists in their time, you’d think they may well use it to buy early bitcoins.
They could of course do so for stocks as well like buying cheap Amazon stocks during their low after the dotcom crash, but with stocks, private investors get the early gains first through equity grabbing by VCs.
This is all a silly joke of course, but it does have a playful learning aspect in introducing people to science and even inspiring them of the potential capabilities of man and women.
While where this naruto run is concerned, there does appear to be something more to it. Something that may have nothing to do with area 51.
The Summer of Dissent
Extinction Rebellion made headlines recently when they brought London to a standstill. They’re to go out again this September.
There’s hardly much connection between narutos and the rebells save for they’re both fairly young.
As 2020 nears, a year that has 20 20 in it, there may be a general sense of a desire to make our governments a bit more accountable and a bit more responsive to the public.
It does often feel like the elected are kind of in a different world, talking often about things no one cares about, not talking as much about what everyone does care about.
The corporate media has much blame to bear because they too usually walk with the elected, and therefore can often be as out of touch as them.
Now that’s generalization, there are many very fine journalists and politicians who do at times even risk their lives to serve the public.
Yet, where was any politician when they brought London to a standstill? You can bet not one politician would show up to naruto run even if 1.8 million Americans do show up.
Congress and Parliament often comes across as deaf. As having no good means of communicating with the public to hear what they have to say and actually do what the public asks.
Again that’s generalization, but there may be a feeling that the streets have been left empty for too long. That politicians as a class in general actually don’t have much of a reason to hear. That the electoral system is played by sending at times very unpopular politicians to the safest seats. That all of it is a bit of a game only for the rich.
It is quite right that this dissent has so far taken the form of a carnival. Even in France, protests have generally been peaceful. In Germany too, recent protests have largely been peaceful as stated by reports on June 22:
“Hundreds of climate activists stormed a massive open-pit coal mine in Germany on Saturday, entering a standoff with police inside the mine while thousands of others maintained separate blockades of the nation’s coal infrastructure as part of a week-long series of actions designed to end Europe’s dependency on fossil fuels.”
This dissent does reflect when it comes to voting, with Greens toping the polls in Germany during this summers’ European election.
It does so only when they are maintained generally peaceful and maybe even somewhat playful because no one in their right mind, in this time of general peace and decent levels of prosperity, would want to overthrow the government.
There’s no alternative as it stands, no pen has come up with one, and even if it does, any transition would have to be very gradual and incremental with schools kept open at all times.
So this dissent is not a prelude to outright revolution, but an announcement, by the young in particular, that they are paying attention and that they won’t let things continue as they are without being heard.
The current system does require some reform so that the street is not necessary for the people to be heard. A Citizen’s Assembly could be one incremental solution to balance the other houses of parliament or congress.
As difficult as the matter of governmental accountability and demand for action on the environment may be, Europe is to embark on a two years long summit.
“I want European citizens to play a leading and active part in building the future of our Union. I want them to have their say at a Conference on the Future of Europe, to start in 2020 and run for two years,” Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Union, said.
For the young in particular who will live with the outcome of this conference, the questions are very complex with many potential governance designs.
On the other hand it can be very exciting because it would be the first time since the establishment of the United States many centuries ago that people will have a say and will decide how they are to be governed.
As long as the streets are peaceful, they can be one way of having such say, but debates and decisions of course must occur in assemblies and at voting booths.
That system does generally work to maintain peace and prosperity while taking into account all resident’s considerations at least to some extent.
But democracy does not begin and it does not end at the voting booth. Without a civil society, without a politically aware and active civil society – always peacefully – then all you have is a facade of democracy.
Those that precede us have for far too long tuned out, with the pen almost going silent. But millennials in particular and those that follow us are now fully aware of the cost of tuning out, of the failure to not keep the donkeys accountable.
They’re like little children in many ways. Eating all the candies if they can get away with it. The public thus now and then has to shout and demand good behavior by the government.
If they do so while having fun too, with music, colorful dresses, silly costumes and a carnival atmosphere, then it’s about time we do have some fun, just as it’s about time we say to grandpas: enough.
The dream of all must be that the next decade brings peace and prosperity with no state enemies. That won’t happen by itself. We all will have to tell our governments to stop fighting everyone, to stop fear propagandizing against their own people, and to get on with the business of building our countries, of saving the planet, and of generally facilitating a very nice existence, a golden age itself with art, science, music and peace, even from our own governments.