Sometimes, Secrets Can Hurt Us (This is going up early because I am busy later) We know there are a lot of things we don’t know. Yes, many of us know we don’t know everything. Then there are others who think they know about what is going on and think they know far more than they really do. There are basically two different types of things we don’t know. The first type is what is being kept from us by various entities such as the government, businesses, organizations and other groups. The second type is what we have not discovered yet. There is no doubt we are being kept in the dark by the first type. If this is questioned we are told it is for national security when it involves the government. When it involves businesses the reason for it is to protect profits. It has been said if we really knew what some businesses were hiding from us it would affect what we eat and what we put into our bodies along with what we use. The second thing which is what we haven’t discovered yet is changing every day as new discoveries are made. Does this lead to us knowing more? In a sense yes, but it can also lead to more being kept from us. There are those who say when we discover a meteor passing the earth after it is almost on top of us it was already discovered, but the event was kept from us to avoid panic and they claim some people know what meteors and asteroids are headed this way even though they don’t always tell us. If we look back at the US government, we see an ever-increasing amount of secrecy. An example of something which has been kept secret which we should have been told about are the rest of the pages of the 9/11 Commission report. There were 28 pages which were only released after pressure was brought to bear. I believe it still had redactions. We should be told everything about 9/11 and should also know why some of the witnesses were never interviewed. Some have said the reason for this is to spare the Saudi government embarrassment. To make things even more confusing the US Government has many different levels of secrecy such as Top Secret, Secret, Confidential, Restricted, Official, Clearance and Compartmented. I have not even mentioned international classifications such as NATO and others. One would think something should either be secret or not and not have so many different levels of secrecy. Think about it, the lowest levels of classification probably are open to many thousands of people, so why not make them open to the public, because the secret is out anyway? There are many of us who believe the way government keeps secrets is overkill and tons of stuff is classified which there is no need for, but it does create work and jobs for bureaucrats. I remember Wikileaks releasing information which showed Snowden the whistleblower had released a secret document which was only classified to help a member of congress avoid embarrassment for something he had done. This was the same person who stated Snowden should be executed. If we are talking about business secrets one of the biggest which was found out was tobacco smoking and snuffing could cause cancer and kill you. We know the tobacco companies kept this secret. They had known about it for generations and yet still continued to push cigarettes which killed millions of people worldwide and never mentioned the fact cigarettes kill. Of course not, money was more important to them than letting people know this information. There have been various claims about pharmaceutical industry which state they knew from tests some drugs were dangerous and kept the data secret. Newsday ran an article which stated negative testing results on a flu drug was hidden from the public and the drug could cause hallucinations. One case in point was about a girl who was taking the drug which gave her thoughts of suicide. This side effect had not been previously mentioned even thought it was very important. It is not only tobacco and big pharma who have secrets about products which could endanger our lives, so do many other companies like automobile companies. One famous American automobile company hid a defect they knew about which was life threating for many years. It was a faulty switch which automatically turned the car’s engine off and prevented the air bags from deploying while the car was moving. It involved many millions of cars. The company had refused several times to fix the problem and at least once said it would be too expensive. Meanwhile people were dying. An investigation by a US Attorney into the problem found an 11-year history of failures and a pattern of incompetence and neglect. Most of us have heard how dangerous asbestos is, but I wonder how many people know the asbestos industry knew this? According to an article on Ewg there were internal documents which show the companies knew how dangerous this stuff was. The article claims there were documents dating all the way back to 1948 which prove this. Here is a document posted on ewg which states it is from 1949 and shows they knew this. While there are many companies hiding dangerous data, I think I will end this article on the subject of food. The FDA, Federal Food and Drug Administration is in charge of checking the safety of food coming into this country among other things. The agency is notoriously underfunded and undermanned. SNN published an article which stated 48 million Americans suffer from illnesses caused by dangerous microbial pathogens lurking in the food we eat. While some of this may be the fault of food preparation in the places we eat, much of it is due to poor inspections. While it is not a secret the FDA cannot adequately perform its assigned task due to lack of personnel, most people don’t know this. |
