[cgbg]

I want to comment on just one item—because it is the most important and affects just about everything .gov does.

This happened to me—and had a major impact on my life.

Many decades ago I worked for the U.S. Census Bureau in their regional office in Dallas, TX.

I was good at my job and became a crew leader who trained my crews and other crews at the office.

We had standard training materials—and one of the mantras we were taught and taught others and told the public many times every day was the following:

“The U.S. Census Bureau has never released information we collect to other government agencies.”

My bosses at the Census Bureau believed it.

I believed it.

My trainees believed it.

The public believed it.

It was a lie.

The lie was known to thousands of people for decades.

Not one of them ever blew the whistle.

Not one.

Ever.

So—how do we know for certain that it was a lie?

A couple of academics were digging in obscure .gov archives in 2000 and discovered it.

Here are the details:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/

Why did everyone who knew about it at the time keep the secret?

—Patriotism
—Shame
—No-one wanted to become a social pariah
—No-one wanted to risk their career

etc etc etc.

People cover up stuff.

They do it a lot.

They do it for a lot of reasons.

But—thousands of people can do it.

For decades.

If these academics had not discovered it we might still not know about it.

Lies can be kept.

[Sicon]

A bunch of government employees covering up (or not even being particularly conscious of/concerned about) the sharing of census data with the Secret Service back in the 1940's (or even the early 2000's) isn't quite on the same level of visibility as the Moon landings, and did not require the active participation of thousands of people in the cover-up. Nor did it require the production of thousands of fake images, fake equipment, fake jobs, fake telemetry and other data, etc. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people who watched the Saturn 5 launches with their own eyes. Are we to believe that NASA launched six Saturn 5 rockets that did nothing more than put a bogus lunar command module and lunar lander into low Earth orbit for anywhere from 8-12 days, each with three men on board who have lied about it right up until their last breath?

Again, it takes far more effort to believe the Moon landings were fake, than it does to look at all of the evidence that proves they actually happened, and believe that they did. Like I said before, Occam's Razor (and common sense).