A WordPress Blog-THE CHURCH MILITANT Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse. ALL CONTENT FROM HTTPS://RATHEREXPOSETHEM.BLOGSPOT.COM MOVED TO THIS NEW BLOG, MAY 2020
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Yes, it has come to this. By a resounding vote of 299 to 116, the UK’s House of Commons on Wednesday outlawed thinking the wrong thoughts in the wrong place. According to the Catholic Herald, MPs including the Conservative government’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Attorney General Victoria Prentis rejected an amendment that would have protected “private prayer and consensual conversations within any ‘censorship’ zone.” “Censorship” zones are areas around abortion centers.
The vote comes just a day after a pro-life activist, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, was arrested for the second time in several weeks for praying silently outside one of the centers for sacrifices to Moloch. “I’m not protesting,” Vaughan-Spruce explained. “I’m not engaging in any of the activities prohibited.” But she was thinking the wrong thoughts and thus had to face what British authorities call “justice” in these dark days.
Jeremiah Igunnubole, who is legal counsel for a firm that has represented people who have been arrested for thought crimes outside of abortion centers, observed that the vote was a “watershed moment for fundamental rights and freedoms in our country.” Yes, indeed. In fact, it is a signpost of the end of freedom in Britain.
Igunnubole continued: “Parliament had an opportunity to reject the criminalization of free thought, which is an absolute right, and embrace individual liberty for all. Instead, Parliament chose to endorse censorship and criminalize peaceful activities such as silent prayer and consensual conversation.” And of course, an extremely dangerous precedent has been set: “Today it’s abortion. Tomorrow it could be another contested matter of political debate.”
According to the Herald, the new law criminalizes “any form of ‘influence’ outside of all abortion facilities, including silent prayer.” Offenders will be fined £100 ($118) the first time they are arrested for wrongthink; if court proceedings are deemed necessary, the fines could increase to £1,000 ($1,183). Amid the debate over this measure, a Conservative MP, Andrew Lewer, injected a note of sanity: “Police shouldn’t be asking ‘What are you thinking about?’” Indeed. And what if the person praying denies the offense? The World Economic Forum has been touting brain implants, and it’s easy to see how handy they’ll be for British police: the bobbies (do they still call these sinister Orwellian figures “bobbies”?) will simply be able to consult a readout of your thoughts, and if prayer shows up, you’ll have to pony up.
Lewer continued to point out what should have been obvious to everyone and prevented even a single MP from voting for this measure: “Censorship of this sort is a notoriously slippery slope. It might not be your thoughts that are criminalized today, but I think we should all be careful not to open the door to that tomorrow about some other opinions that people may hold about something else.” Now that the door has indeed been opened, Conservative MP Sir John Hayes spelled out the implications: “We now have people arrested for praying, interrogated by the police, asked what they’re praying about, what they’re thinking. This is dystopian. It’s like a mix of Huxley, Philip Dick, and all that.” Quite right, old fellow, and don’t forget that Orwell chap, eh wot?
There are, meanwhile, a few more important matters that British police could be doing instead of spending their time arresting people for thinking the wrong thoughts. Another MP, Eddie Hughes, pointed out that “Given the other crimes that were going on in Birmingham at that time,” that is, the time that Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested for praying silently, “it is important to see that the police had clearly determined that the most important thing they had to do at that particular time was not to deal with knife crime or with people stealing tools out of other people’s vans to stop them earning a living but to arrest and interrogate a woman who was silently praying outside a clinic that was closed. Surely that shows a sense of complete disproportionality on the part of the police.” Yes, it does, and it’s going to get worse.
MP Ian Paisley (not to be confused with the late Northern Irish preacher) added: “Despite the level of crime across this society—I think there were over 500 knife crimes last year—are we actually going to ask the police to get engaged and be detained in questioning people about what they are thinking in certain parts of the United Kingdom? That is a complete waste of police resources and police time, and it should not be done.” It should not, but now it will be. And the Biden regime, no friend of the freedom of speech itself, is watching and (silently) taking notes.
BIDEN SIGNS EXECUTIVE ORDER TO EXPLORE FEDERAL DIGITAL CURRENCY
Dr. Michael Rectenwald, author, Distinguished Fellow at Hillsdale College, and former NYU Professor. He is the author of “The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda” Michael discusses the various components of the Great Reset, including the economic system it establishes, the deep history of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the population control "ethics" of the WEF and related globalist organizations. You can find Michaels’ book here: The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda.
Another high-altitude flying "unidentified object" was shot down Saturday by a US fighter jet over northern Canada at the request of their prime minister.
Seymour Hersh cracks open the Nord Stream 2 story with a bombshell report. Devil worshipping pop stars rack up Grammys. Is American culture on a Highway to Hell?
Selwyn Duke checks in to take a closer look, as Daniel Natal breaks down the news with Rebecca Terrell for today’s episode of The New American TV with Rebecca Terrell.
Also featured: Arpa-H explained, Legislative Analysis, The Twitter Files and much more.
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
What are the motives and significance of the Chinese spy balloon penetration of U.S. territory, and why now? First the backstory:
China’s military capability may soon rival that of the United States. What holds back Chinese President Xi Jinping from moving militarily on Taiwan are two things: First he may think that time is on his side, with Biden’s America in decline and a perception that a two-year window remains for action. Second, what holds Xi Jinping back is of course his concern that if the invasion fails, he would be removed by the CCP.
So, Xi continues to build Chinese military power capabilities while the U.S. deteriorates, and he bides his time while studying and calculating the range of responses from the U.S. that China would face from such an invasion.
The Chinese projection of power against the United States is shaped by two priorities. First, is their commitment to what is known as unrestricted warfare, one part of which emphasizes using multinational, non-state, and supranational organizations to counter the U.S. Toward this end, the Chinese now control the U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO), which provides China with a proxy front to impose an unprecedented medical tyranny far exceeding the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns and controls. The second priority is the age-old Chinese military strategy that emphasizes “the supreme excellence of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” Even if the Chinese cannot match the U.S. military because of U.S. export controls on high-end semiconductors and advanced AI technology, Beijing believes their level of control in the U.S. can continue America’s demoralization and division—potentially leading to collapse. Said another way, China is delaying military action in hopes of breaking America without fighting.
As for engaging the U.S. militarily, Xi and his advisors study America’s past. They know the U.S. military’s masterful logistics can deliver swift and decisive enemy defeat, such as the Bush administration’s victory in the Gulf War in 1990-1991. But the Chinese also note the fecklessness of the Clinton and Obama administrations that followed, in which two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed; Egyptian ally Hosni Mubarak was abandoned; the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya was destroyed, and ISIS appeared invincible after two and a half years of U.S. military engagement.
After Trump became president in January 2017 the Chinese witnessed a dramatic reversal. Within about a month of taking office, Trump unleashed American power that decimated ISIS within weeks. A month later Trump ordered a strike of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles that took out Syria’s air force. And in early 2020 Trump authorized a drone strike in Iraq that killed Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and the number two leader of Iran.
Everything changed with the 2020 election—characterized by massive voting irregularities—that displaced Trump and delivered Joe Biden as U.S. President. What most voters didn’t know, but Xi Jinping did know, was that Biden was a compromised president. The Biden family had received—in prior years leading up to the election—tens of millions of dollars from Chinese business deals, and the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania had received $70 million from sources in China.
Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, a brilliant lawyer and the most successful prosecutor of the Mafia who conducted a forensic analysis of the Hunter Biden laptop and its contents, described the Biden Family as being “owned by the Chinese Communist Party,” and Joe Biden himself as being “in partnership with the Chinese Communist Party.”
The weakness Biden signaled as President, characterized by his inexplicable decision to abruptly withdraw from Afghanistan, leaving behind some $80 billion of advanced U.S. military equipment and abandoning the strategically located Bagram Air Base was naturally encouraging for Xi. Biden’s top military generals, Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chief General Mark Milley, who were involved in the Afghanistan decision-making fiasco, have also originated other harmful leadership initiatives, such as universal mandatory Covid-19 vaccination requirements and obligatory Critical Race Theory indoctrination for the officer corps and the enlistees in all military branches—both of which policies significantly added to the demoralization of the military—resulting in recruiting shortfalls—with all of it being observed and digested by the Chinese leadership.
Xi’s authorization of launching a spy balloon and have it fly over a broad swath of the United States, and hover over sensitive areas to collect intelligence data where nuclear warheads are siloed, was also intended to accomplish several important objectives for the Chinese:
First, the Chinese penetration by a spy balloon of U.S. territory succeeded in publicly humiliating America—reinforcing the lesson of Afghanistan to allies such as Taiwan—that the United States is unreliable—lacking courage and a comprehensive strategy to defend its own territory.
Second, the spy balloon was likely used to test America’s ability to detect incoming threats and to find holes in the country’s air defense warning system. The spy balloon first came into U.S. airspace over the sparsely populated Alaskan Aleutian Islands on January 28, when the U.S. military should have blown it out of the sky. Perhaps there’s a hole, as there was no response nor any scrambling of U.S. fighter jets.
Third, Beijing could see Biden’s weakness and willingness to defer power to subordinates in the response to his order to shoot the spy satellite down three days later, on February 1st, when it entered Montana airspace. After giving the order, Biden passed the buck to military advisors who said “wait till the balloon crosses the country and gets to the Atlantic”—all of which prolonged the nation’s humiliation and demonstrated a fundamentally flawed decision-making process, which Beijing was no doubt testing. Said another way, Xi wanted to reconfirm Milley’s deference to China, which Milley had previously demonstrated twice in communicating critical national security information to Chinese leaders in December and January 2020-2021, without President Trump’s knowledge or consent.
All of this is the consequence of corruption and the 2020 election irregularity.
Scott Powell is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger China and a senior fellow at Discovery Institute. His recent book, Rediscovering America, was #1 new release in history for eight straight weeks at Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637581599). Reach him at scottp@discovery.org.
Hudson Institute China expert Michael Pillsbury weighs in on China’s surveillance mission and their decision to increasingly purchase farmland close to U.S. military bases
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Gingrich: You think Biden is going to tell the truth tonight during 'dishonest' SOTU?
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Now that the infamous Chinese spy balloon has finally been shot down after it had traversed the United States and thus apparently completed its mission, Old Joe Biden and the people who are really running this regime are in furious damage-control mode. It’s easy to see why: in one move, Biden’s handlers have managed simultaneously to enrage the Chinese and look weak and dithering, and so Biden’s Defense Department has now issued a statement attempting to downplay the whole thing and throw some shade upon Old Joe’s bête noire, Donald Trump. The DOD is claiming that not one, not two, but three Chinese spy balloons flew over the U.S. during his administration, and President America First neither told the American people nor did anything about them. See, Old Joe doesn’t look so bad now, right? The only problem is that the DoD’s story raises more questions than it answers.
Trump, as you might have expected, denied this, declaring on Sunday morning: “The Chinese Balloon situation is a disgrace, just like the Afghanistan horror show, and everything else surrounding the grossly incompetent Biden Administration. They are only good at cheating in elections, and disinformation — and now they are putting out that a Balloon was put up by China during the Trump Administration, in order to take the ‘heat’ off the slow-moving Biden fools. China had too much respect for ‘TRUMP’ for this to have happened, and it NEVER did. JUST FAKE DISINFORMATION!” Many, of course, will dismiss Trump’s denial, just as they dismissed his denials of the Russian collusion hoax and a thousand other charges against him that turned out to be false all along, but there is more also that casts doubt upon the Defense Department’s assertion.
Mark Esper was a top Trump administration official, serving as Secretary of the Army from November 2017 to July 2019 and Secretary of Defense from July 2019 to November 2020. He recounts: “I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States. I would remember that for sure.” That raises several possibilities. Esper himself may not be telling the truth, in an attempt to cover for his old boss. The second possibility is that there were no Chinese spy balloons flying over the U.S. during the Trump administration, and the Defense Department is the one that’s lying, in an attempt to cover for President Dementia and his China-linked son.
A third possibility is that three Chinese spy balloons did indeed conduct high-altitude surveillance over the United States during the Trump administration, and the Defense Department knew about it but didn’t alert Esper or Trump. Inconceivable? Not in the slightest degree. DefenseOne reported back in November 2020 that Jim Jeffrey, who had served as Trump’s special envoy for Syria, boasted that he circumvented Trump’s orders to withdraw American troops from Syria by lying to the President.
Jeffrey, according to DefenseOne, acknowledged that “his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.” Jeffrey explained: “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” and said that “the actual number of troops in northeast Syria is ‘a lot more than’ the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.’”
Jeffrey decided to thwart the will of the Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces because, he said, the order to withdraw from Syria was “the most controversial thing in my fifty years in government.” Jeffrey even boasted about his defiance: “What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syrian withdrawal. When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.” Cool story, bro. And not in the least implausible. We discovered the existence of the Deep State during the Trump administration because of its boasts about thwarting his agenda while inside the government. Jeffrey was just another Deep Stater.
Even now, Old Joe claimed Saturday that he had wanted the balloon shot down on Wednesday, but was overruled by the Pentagon. So Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark “Thoroughly Modern” Milley is now the Commander-In-Chief? Who elected him? Of course, that question could be asked about a lot of people these days. But given the Deep State’s hatred of Trump and long record of deception, there is abundant reason to doubt the Biden Defense Department’s face-saving statement and not a whole lot of reason to believe it.
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
How cowardly and compromised is the Biden regime? We have fresh evidence of just how bad it is, courtesy of the Chinese spy balloon. The world found out about the now-infamous balloon on Thursday, when a Montana resident named Chase Doak spotted it and posted a video. But that was not the first that Old Joe Biden’s handlers heard of the balloon. Now it has come to light that they knew about it all along but kept the knowledge secret so as to avoid a confrontation with the Chinese Communist Party and keep Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s now-canceled trip to Beijing on track. Patriots can thank Chase Doak for the small show of spine from the Biden State Department that the cancellation represented.
“Not gonna lie,” Doak tweeted with his video. “First, I thought this was a #ufo. Then, I thought it was @elonmusk in a Wizard of Oz cosplay scenario. But it was just a run-of-the-mill Chinese spy balloon!” But Bloomberg revealed in a bombshell report Friday that “as it turns out, US authorities were well aware of the unidentified object that had entered American airspace on Jan. 28, that had then left and re-entered over North Idaho on Tuesday.” But Blinken was slated to huddle with the ChiComs in Beijing, and Old Joe and his henchmen didn’t want to let something as trivial as what J. Michael Waller of the Center for Security Policy terms “China’s military espionage incursion into the US” get in the way of a friendly tête-à-tête in the Forbidden City.
In fact, Biden had already been informed about the spy balloon long before Chase Doak spotted it, and his handlers were holding nervous discussions about whether or not to shoot it down. Yet Blinken thundered Friday that China’s decision to launch the spy balloon was an “irresponsible act” that represented a “clear violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law.” He added that China’s “decision to take this action on the eve of my planned visit is detrimental to the substantive discussions that we were prepared to have.”
As it turns out, this was all an act, a bit of shameless and dishonest posturing from what must be the most dishonest administration the American people have ever had to endure. When he struck this pose of moral indignation over China’s “decision to take this action on the eve of my planned visit,” Blinken actually had planned just days before to go ahead with his visit even though he knew all about the Chinese spy balloon.
Blinken also knew that the thing was likely hovering over Montana because Malmstrom Air Force Base, where a large number of the U.S.’s Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles are located, is there. Nonetheless, Biden’s handlers didn’t dare to do anything that might be perceived as taking a hard line on China, and Blinken’s trip was going to go on as if all were well. That is until Chase Doak entered the picture.
Bloomberg notes that “as the balloon continued to hover over the Big Sky state on Wednesday, Biden huddled with his national security team to receive a detailed briefing on the balloon. The president argued for shooting the object down, but was urged against doing so by his most senior military advisors.” The hyper-woke pair of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A. Milley argued against doing anything about the balloon, arguing that American citizens might be put at risk by any such action as if they weren’t already being put at risk by their government’s open demonstration of cowardice and weakness. But Old Joe agreed that the wokesters had a point and decided to let the balloon go on its merry way and let Blinken head to Beijing. “For now,” Bloomberg adds laconically, “the White House opted not to inform the American public. Events, however, soon forced Biden’s hand.”
In December, before Chase Doak and the world spotted the Chinese spy balloon, Peter Schweizer of the Government Accountability Institute told Mark Levin about Hunter Biden’s strange dealings with China. Schweizer noted that in 2009, Hunter Biden set up a firm in Washington near the office of the vice president, and “two years after that, he signs a multibillion-dollar private equity deal bankrolled by the Bank of China. The executives that made that happen actually met with Vice President Biden about a year earlier. Of course, that deal was consummated when Hunter Biden flew with his father on Air Force One to China. His father had official visits. Hunter was meeting with his business partners. So Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and this corruption joined at the hip. What we have to factor in this is ultimately, in my mind, not a story about corruption but compromise. It is about national security, and it is about spying.”
Spying. Hmm. When they concluded this deal, did the Bidens and the Chinese release any celebratory balloons?
ABOVE: President Joe Biden is pictured on Thursday speaking at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. The inset, left, shows a ceremony to admit new members of the Communist Party of China, while the inset, right, portrays an Israeli-made surveillance balloon in India. Biden on Thursday faced criticism from Republicans after he declined to shoot down a Chinese surveillance balloon over Montana, heeding the advice of his military leadership.
The Pentagon said at midday Friday that a Chinese spy balloon had moved eastward and was over the central United States, and that the U.S. rejected China's claims that it was not being used for surveillance.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the balloon from China is their leader Xi Jinping's way of 'testing' America
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CCP: A "WEATHER SURVEILLANCE DEVICE"???
Chinese SPY Balloon Photos - New HD pictures of the Balloon over Montana
US Scrambles F22 Raptors After Chinese Spy Balloon Spotted Over Montana
Pentagon Addresses Suspected Chinese Spy Balloon LIVE
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
The Pentagon admitted on Thursday that the U.S. military has been monitoring what’s being described as a Chinese “surveillance balloon” hovering in the skies over the United States for days.
“The United States government has detected and is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now,” Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told NBC News. “We continue to track and monitor it closely.” Officials have confirmed that the balloon belongs to China.
“Once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information,” Ryder said.
“The official said there was a window while the balloon was over Montana Wednesday when they could have taken it down. NORAD sent aircraft — including F-22 Raptors from Nellis Air Force Base and airborne early warning aircraft known as AWACs — but the official would not say whether one of the options was to shoot the balloon out of the sky with a U.S. aircraft,” NBC reported. “The U.S. military flights prompted a ground stop at the airport in Billings, with air traffic controllers citing a ‘special military mission.'”
According to the Montana Free Press, “The Air Force at Malmstrom [Air Force Base] maintains 150 intercontinental ballistic missile silos across its 13,800-square-mile complex in central Montana.”
Biden refused to answer questions shouted at him by reporters Thursday afternoon.
Officials say the balloon flew over the Aleutian Islands and through Canada before settling over the Billings, Mont., area. The balloon is still hovering somewhere over the United States, according to a senior defense official who declined to say where it is now.
Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement that the balloon is “currently traveling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground.”
There’s been no mention by officials of the threat of a dirty bomb or an EMP, although there’s been plenty of speculation about that on Twitter.
At least one Twitter user, however, claims that it would be impossible for a balloon to launch an EMP attack:
On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin convened a meeting of senior military and defense leaders, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, NORTHCOM/NORAD Commander Gen. Glen VanHerck, and other combatant commanders.
Austin was traveling in the Philippines at the time.
The leaders reviewed the threat profile of the Chinese stratospheric balloon and possible response options, and ultimately decided not to recommend taking it out kinetically, because of the risk to safety and security of people on the ground from the possible debris field. Pentagon leaders presented the options to President Joe Biden on Wednesday.
A senior administration official confirmed that Biden had been briefed and received a “strong recommendation” that the balloon not be shot down.
Startlingly, this is not the first time a Chinese spy satellite has breached U.S. airspace, but it’s unusual for one to hover over one specific area for an extended period of time.
“Instances of this activity have been observed over the past several years, including prior to this administration,” a senior administration official told NBC. “We acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information.”
YourBigSky, an ABC and Fox portal, is sharing pictures reportedly showing the spy balloon, although these have not been confirmed by the Pentagon.
These are reportedly videos of the balloon, which has been described as being the size of three large buses on social media:
“Currently we assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective over and above what the PRC can do through other means,” the official said. “Nevertheless we are taking all necessary steps to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information.”
I’m no foreign policy expert, but I’m not gonna lie: If I were in charge, here’s what that Chi-com spy balloon would look like right now:
In the meantime, if anyone needs me…
Dan Grossi
Sadly, we don’t have a Ronald Reagan running the country right now. We have the husk of an aging, debilitated lifelong politician in the White House. If you’re like me, you have zero confidence that Biden will be able to stand up to the forces of evil aligned against the United States, which is a terrifying thought. And what better time for our enemies to attack? Please know that PJ Media will continue to report on the incompetent, corrupt Biden administration. If you’d like to join us in the fight to keep America safefrom the Chi-coms and our other enemies around the world (including those coming through our open southern border), please become a VIP member today. For around 50 cents a week, you can play a vital role in helping us fight back. Use the promo code SAVEAMERICA for a 40% discount on an annual membership.
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has given the Biden administration’s response to President Xi Jinping and China for their brazenly illegal act of sending a balloon over U.S. territory to spy on the United States.
How do we know it’s a spy balloon? We don’t have to know. We can, should, and must assume that’s what it’s doing.
Blinken, along with his advisors Wynken and Nod, has come up with a brilliant riposte to this Chinese transgression. The United States will deny China the pleasure and honor of hosting the U.S. secretary of state this week as planned.
It’s the well-practiced “comfy chair” response to China. Unfortunately, it’s not likely to impress President Xi. In fact, Xi couldn’t care less if Blinken comes to Beijing or not. He must be watching the diplomatic byplay with amusement.
Blinken and one of his deputies spoke with the Chinese Embassy on Wednesday night, and on Friday morning, he told China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, that the balloon’s course was a violation of sovereignty and “unacceptable,” according to a State Department official.
Oh, dear! Did ya hear that Xi-man? It’s “unacceptable” to fly your aircraft over U.S. territory.
Beijing had sought to defuse tensions with Washington on Friday over the balloon, expressing its regret over the incident, and saying the balloon was for civilian research and had “deviated far from its planned course.”
The explanation from the Chinese Foreign Ministry came after Pentagon officials said on Thursday that they had detected a balloon, “most certainly launched by the People’s Republic of China,” over Montana, which is home to about 150 intercontinental ballistic missile silos.
Just an accident, Mr. President. Really. How were we supposed to know that the bulk of the U.S. ground-based nuclear deterrence force was based in Montana? A completely honest and natural mistake?
The U.S. response should be short and quick. No need to waste a sophisticated missile on the interloping balloon. A couple of rounds from an F-35 Gatling gun would do the trick.
Does anyone not named Biden think that if the roles were reversed — if the U.S. had “accidentally” sent a balloon that flew over China — that Xi would not order the damn thing shot down the minute it crossed Chinese air space?
China isn’t going to start World War III if we treat the balloon as a hostile aircraft and shoot it down. Even if it’s harmless, as the Pentagon believes, it’s here and it’s flouting our air space.
Pentagon Press Secretary U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder and a senior U.S. defense official provided details about the ballon. “First, our best assessment at the moment is that whatever the surveillance payload is on this balloon, it does not create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in Low Earth Orbit,” the official added. “But out of an abundance of caution, we have taken additional mitigation steps. I’m not going to go into what those are.
The experts at The Drive’s The War Zone disagree that there’s no added benefit to floating a balloon above U.S. military installations: “The idea that a terrestrial aerial platform in close proximity and floating for long periods above major military installations and other sensitive locales is not significantly more of a threat than what can be collected by satellites in orbit is a debatable claim.”
This was no “accident,” as a senior defense official told The War Zone.
“Clearly they’re trying to fly over sensitive sites,” the senior defense official said. They added that the balloon’s current anticipated flight path takes it over a number of locations of potential interest, but would not specify what those were. It was noted during the press conference that Montana is home to Malmstrom Air Force Base with well over 100 silos holding nuclear-tipped Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles belonging to the 341st Missile Wing.
Given this information, Joe Biden is doing nothing laudatory, nor is he showing “restraint” by not turning this balloon into a flaming ball of gas. He’s showing incredible weakness. It’s a balloon, damn it. Blow it out of the sky and tell Mr. Xi that any more “accidental” balloons that drift over American airspace will be dealt with in a similar fashion.
Amalgamated Bank CEO Priscilla Sims Brown explains how her new role as a fortune-telling medium can dispatch state enforcers to whomever her cards predict needs looking into. (New York Times Events/YouTube)
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Banks are developing technology to identify potential mass shooters, according to a CEO backing the push to get credit-card companies to more closely track gun purchases,” Daily Business Review claims. Or rather, Bloomberg News (!), which provided this propaganda piece, does.
“‘Detection scenarios’ are in the works that, if triggered, would prompt banks to file a Suspicious Activity Report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network,” the story elaborates, citing Amalgamated Bank Chief Executive Officer Priscilla Sims Brown.
Brown did not identify the psychic technology that will allow Amalgamated to reliably predict future probabilities accurately enough to justify reporting citizens to law enforcement for investigation — that is, to activate authorities to punish based on a belief in magic, just like the witch trials of old. But we do know from past media statements the types of thresholds she envisions.
“Software would be able to detect, for example, if someone spent $1,000 at a firearm store, and on the same day, received a $1,000 deposit from someone who is not legally allowed to purchase firearms themselves,” she advocated, as quoted in my August Firearms News report.
“The software would know the ‘prohibited person’ status? How?” I asked at the time. “Are banks now going to tap into NICS and perform after-the-fact ‘background checks? How is such data sharing with private parties authorized by law?”
Especially since we’re told, “The merchant code doesn’t go to the SKU [Stock Keeping Unit] level.” So now we see the plan is to create soothsaying algorithms and use those to go running to the authorities.
What could go wrong?
If we’re talking about stopping a mass shooter before he can act, time is of the essence. An immediate and forceful law enforcement deployment hardly seems a far-fetched police response, especially with high-profile embarrassments over inaction like Parkland and Uvalde giving all the incentive needed to not want to be the goats on another incident. What are they going to say if something happens on their watch and the banks are out there lamenting “We TOLD them” to the media?
But what happens when it turns out to be a “false positive”? After all, no less an “authority” than the State of California Department of Justice, with law enforcement visibility and a criminal record database greater and more specific than anything Amalgamated Bank is going to feed into its fortune teller machine just recently denied a sale to a longtime gun owner and concealed carry permit holder, and then a few days later, with his purchase still on hold, allowed his ammo purchase to go through.
And what happens if the police show up at a “detection scenario” subject’s house and, following the prime directive of making it home at the end of their shift above all else, open fire on and kill the poor guy, as happened recently in Austin? If it turns out to be an “Oops, our bad!” situation, will Amalgamated (and any bank using its software as a reporting “trigger”) share in the liability?
You know and I know (and the calculating minds behind this know) that impossible-to-achieve clairvoyance will end up preventing no mass shootings. The only ones who don’t know that are the willfully self-deluded useful idiots eager to lemming up for whatever abrogation of rights they’re being instructed to demand. Anyone disarmed (and without due process!) who is an actual danger will still be a danger if he’s not also separated from the potential victim pool. “Gun control” schemes don’t work and this one certainly won’t. And don’t forget, it’s the antis insisting to have it both ways by also claiming it’s easier to get a gun than it is a book or a vegetable.
For some reason, the IT term “GIGO” (Garbage In, Garbage Out) comes to mind. That and Priscilla Sims Brown sitting at her desk in a trance asking, “Magic 8 Ball: Should I report this purchase to the feds?” and then acting on its response.
The other thing that comes to mind is the dystopian Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report:
“In the year 2054 A.D. crime is virtually eliminated from Washington D.C. thanks to an elite law enforcing squad ‘Precrime’. They use three gifted humans (called ‘Pre-Cogs’) with special powers to see into the future and predict crimes beforehand.”
Since it’s unlikely Sims Brown has a trio of mutants isolated in a photon milk bath at corporate HQ, how Amalgamated justifies acting on its “snitchware” (yeah, it’s a real neologism) is unclear unless you compare what they’re doing to a real crime, which depriving citizens of rights without due process has heretofore been considered. They have the means and they’re creating the opportunity. All that’s left is to discern their motive.
“Amalgamated, majority owned by Workers United, ‘has aggressively carved out a position as the left’s private banker, leveraging deep connections with the Democratic establishment.’ Workers United, in turn, is a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate, which, per The Washington Free Beacon, ‘rakes in millions from Dem campaigns, liberal orgs.’ And the SEIU, in turn, has organized rallies and marched in solidarity with communists.”
So maybe it’s not really about “commonsense gun safety”?
That should be obvious when you further consider the only people this would affect are the “law-abiding” kind. This, of course, won’t slow a career criminal getting his guns the “traditional way,” that is, illegally, one bit. It will, however, provide the gun-grabbers with another “loophole” to exploit by demanding the end of private sales.
That this is now being embraced by the International Organization for Standardization dovetails “nicely” with dragging the U.S. into the global citizen disarmament campaign. Speaking as someone with no small amount of real-world ISO experience in my past career, nothing at the time suggested facilitating the subversion of unalienable rights was one of the goals.
We didn’t have the hindsight back then to foresee today’s rush to economic fascist woke “capitalist” rope-selling, but now it’s no surprise that it all boils down to enemies foreign and domestic. This further illustrates the remarkable and visionary foresight of the Founders when they passed the Bill of Rights in general and the Second Amendment in particular on to posterity.
Funny, who ended up being able to anticipate future probabilities…
Here’s Priscilla Sims Brown hawking her rights-swingling scam to the “sophisticated” urban provincials at The New York Times DealBook Conference: (SEE ABOVE)
Right before Thanksgiving, our trusted leaders in D.C. did what they did best: They pushed forward controversial policies while YOU weren’t watching. In this clip, Glenn details how the Fed began its ‘Central Bank Digital Currency’ program last Wednesday afternoon, while Americans were busy preparing for the holidays. Plus, Glenn explains another, big decision the Biden administration made that very same day...
Say Good Bye To Your Freedom: Fed Announces CBDC Trial
After FTX Scam, Federal Reserve Makes its Move With a Digital US Dollar
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
(Natural News) When Barack Obama was in the White House and Democrats controlled Congress for his first two years in office, they passed a bill dubbed “Obamacare” that was the first step toward giving federal government bureaucrats complete control over Americans’ health care.
Since all Americans require medical care during their lives, the move was seen by critics as the ultimate authoritarian move; after all, if the government controls all healthcare decisions, tyrannical government bureaucrats could then begin to dictate behaviors and reward or punish people based on behavior.
Now, the government is attempting yet another major authoritarian move: The creation of a “digital currency” with the endgame objective being to control behaviors through “programmable” money that can influence and/or block certain spending habits.
“The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Center, or NYIC, announced that it would be launching a 12-week proof-of-concept pilot for a central bank digital currency, or CBDC,” Coin Telegraph reported this week.
The outlet continued: “In a Nov. 15 announcement, the New York Fed said the program would explore the feasibility of an ‘interoperable network of central bank wholesale digital money and commercial bank digital money operating on a shared multi-entity distributed ledger’ on a regulated liability network. Banking giants including BNY Mellon, Citi, HSBC, Mastercard, PNC Bank, TD Bank, Trust, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo will be participating in the pilot by issuing tokens and settling transactions through simulated central bank reserves.”
Mind you, the participating banks are advertising this simply as a concept to make interoperability more feasible, but make no mistake, this ‘test’ is research: The Fed wants to develop and then hone this technology so that a ‘programmable’ digital currency can be introduced to the general public for the express purpose of controlling spending habits by favoring or disfavoring products (think ‘yes’ for electric cars, solar panels, and fake ‘meat’ but ‘no’ for cigarettes, alcohol, gasoline, and anything deemed ‘harmful to the planet’).
“The NYIC looks forward to collaborating with members of the banking community to advance research on asset tokenization and the future of financial market infrastructures in the U.S. as money and banking evolve,” NYIC Director Per von Zelowitz said in announcing the pilot program.
“Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Esther George said in an interview that inflation is at risk of growing entrenched in the economy, making it difficult for the Federal Reserve to fight inflation without a recession. George said that labor is the driver of inflation now, rather than supply chain or production shortages, and the real challenge for policymakers is prematurely ending rate increases,” private intelligence firm Forward Observer reported in a note to subscribers earlier this month.
An accompanying analyst comment noted: “Fed officials have previously waved off the risk of recession, so this admission is significant. George is now saying the proverbial quiet part out loud, as [Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome] Powell has been engineering a deliberate recession since last year.”
Now, as an engineered recession is upon us, the same Fed will be introducing a digital currency that it can manipulate on behalf of the wishes of the deep state permanent government.
N.Y. Fed said in a statement: “This U.S. proof-of-concept project is experimenting with the concept of a regulated liability network. It will test the technical feasibility, legal viability, and business applicability of distributed ledger technology to settle the liabilities of regulated financial institutions through the transfer of central bank liabilities.”
“The NYIC looks forward to collaborating with members of the banking community to advance research on asset tokenization and the future of financial market infrastructures in the U.S. as money and banking evolve,” said Per von Zelowitz, Director of the New York Innovation Center.
…’as money and banking evolve.’
Why do either of these have to “evolve” in the first place?
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Do you want to know how many cameras are watching you right now? When you go to work? When you go to church? When you run errands around town?
For decades, the government of the United States has been unconstitutionally and surreptitiously surveilling American citizens. Perhaps it’s time the watched become the watchers.
On November 17, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s director of investigations, Dave Maass, sent out the following message:
This week, EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance project hit a bittersweet milestone. The Atlas of Surveillance has now hit 10,000 data points. It contains at least partial data on approximately 5,500 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states, as well as most territories and districts.
For those unfamiliar with the Atlas of Surveillance, here’s the description of the project published by EFF:
The Atlas of Surveillance is a database of surveillance technologies deployed by law enforcement in communities across the United States.
This includes drones, body-worn cameras, automated license plate readers, facial recognition, and more.
This research was compiled by more than 1,000 students and volunteers, and incorporates datasets from a variety of public and non-profit sources.
While certainly not a complete catalog of all the millions of cameras and microphones collecting data that is then sent to the government, the Atlas of Surveillance is helpful and is a ready resource for anyone committed to the Constitution and to the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment.
You can search the Atlas, you can move around the map, and can choose the type of surveillance collection you’re interested in seeking: license-plate readers, doorbell cameras, and other facial recognition devices.
Something that becomes instantly evident after playing around with the Atlas of Surveillance is that anyone living in a city of any substantial size will discover that hiding from the all-seeing eye of the federal government is nearly impossible.
For those of you who doubt this claim, consider this information provided by EFF:
However, this milestone sadly also reflects the massive growth of surveillance adoption by police agencies. High-tech spying is no longer limited to well-resourced urban areas; even the smallest hamlet’s police department might be deploying powerful technology that gathers data on its residents, regardless of whether those residents are connected to a criminal case. We’ve seen the number of partnerships between police and the home surveillance company Ring grow from 1,300 to more than 2,000. In the two years since we first published a complementary report on real-time crime centers — essentially police tech hubs, filled with wall-to-wall camera monitors and computers jacked into surveillance datasets — the number of such centers in the U.S. has grown from 80 to 100.
And, as I’ve also previously reported, red-light and transportation cameras also send the images and sounds they collect to government agencies, who then collect and catalog the data.
The rapid spread of surveillance devices and their increasingly pervasive technology is converting the United States (and the entire globe) into a wall-less prison. Every individual, regardless of criminal intent or activity, is being monitored by the government using technology not available to the general public, thus making us subjects of a state-run surveillance regime that is itself impenetrable and invisible.
Well, mostly invisible.
Thanks to the Atlas of Surveillance project, perhaps some of the watchers can now be watched, or at least identified.
Perchance the invisible electronic walls keeping us as virtual prisoners in a global gulag will fall faster as we consistently demand that those chosen to lead us to adhere to constitutional principles of individual liberty, particularly when these officials attempt to protect their power by monitoring the population for signs of dissent.
Remember: If you want to truly be constitutionally consistent, then you must understand and agree that every collection by the federal government of images and sounds is a direct, open, and hostile violation of the protections provided by the Fourth Amendment against such surveillance.
The Fourth Amendment reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Having the eye of the Atlas of Surveillance identifying and revealing many of the millions of cameras and microphones used by the local and federal government to keep us in their sights is a great boon to the protection of liberty, as it might work to prevent overzealous agencies from using electronic tracking technology to collect data from people who have not been afforded due process.
The rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment are under nearly constant assault by the forces of the federal government. From NSA surveillance to IRS use of tax records as a political tool, the papers, effects, and homes of all Americans are now de facto denied the protections our Founders held so dear.
So, go over to the Atlas of Surveillance, put in your address, and see just how wide the field of vision of the never-blinking eye of government really is … if you dare.
Joe Wolverton II, J.D., is the author of the books The Real James Madison and “What Degree of Madness?”: Madison’s Method to Make America STATES Again. His latest book — The Founders’ Recipe — provides selections from the 37 authors most often quoted by the Founding Generation. He hosts the YouTube channel “Teacher of Liberty” and the Instagram account of the same name.
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
(Natural News) The personal data of more than 145 million Americans are being indiscriminately handed over by the Biden regime’s State Department to various law enforcement and intelligence agencies for illegal and unconstitutional probing, according to a letter sent from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Without any proper legal due process or apparent oversight, Biden’s State Department is reportedly pulling private information from people’s passport applications without their knowledge or consent and passing it off to other government agencies. Wyden’s letter is part of an ongoing investigation into Operation Whistle Pig, a wide-ranging leak investigation launched by a Border Patrol agent and several of his supervisors at the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol’s National Targeting Center.
“I write to express serious concern that the Department of State is providing law enforcement and intelligence agencies with unfettered access to personal data, originally collected through passport applications, of the more than 145 million Americans with a passport,” Wyden’s letter reads.
It adds that “the breadth of this access highlights the potential for other abuses. In a July 13, 2022, briefing for my office, State Department officials confirmed that 25 other federal agencies have access to the Department’s database of passport applications.” (Related: In April, Biden’s State Department issued a memo claiming that covid “most likely” escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.)
The Biden regime is an unlawful and unconstitutional regime
Among the data being collected from Americans and passed from the federal government to law enforcement and intelligence groups are names, addresses, birth dates, biometric data like fingerprints and facial images, email addresses, phone numbers, gender, race, Social Security numbers, and other private information.
“The [State] Department’s mission does not include providing dozens of other government agencies with self-service access to 145 million Americans’ personal data,” Wyden’s letter goes on to state.
“The Department has voluntarily taken on this role, and in doing so, prioritized the interests of other agencies over those of law-abiding Americans. While there is a legitimate role for the use of this information by law enforcement, the current unregulated system of interagency access to millions of Americans’ records goes far beyond what a reasonable person would expect or tolerate.”
There is no legal requirement that the State Department provide any of this information upon request, except through a normal legal process such as a subpoena or court order. In this case, there is none of that present, which means the Biden regime is committing an unconstitutional act.
It remains unknown the level to which each of the 25 law enforcement and intelligence agencies on the dole has access to said data. Some may only have access to a small amount of it while others have full access – we just do not know because there is no transparency.
Wyden also alleges that a Border Patrol agent misused government databases to pursue a rogue leak investigation into a news reporter and her relationship with a congressional staffer. The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) launched a probe into these allegations, as well as into the work of said Border Patrol agent.
What the OIG investigation has uncovered thus far as part of a more than 500-page unredacted report forms the basis of the Operation Whistle Pig investigation, which you can learn more about at this link.
“Abuses of this access came to light through a report of an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (OIG) into activities at Customs and Border Protection (CBP),” a letter about the investigation states.
Want to keep up with the latest nest about the Biden regime? Visit Corruption.news.
“The Trans Buddy Program’s goal is to increase access to care and improve healthcare outcomes for transgender people by providing emotional support to transgender patients during healthcare visits. We emphasize a patient-centered approach, with the goal of empowering the patient to make informed healthcare decisions. Trans Buddy recognizes the importance of intersectionality to our direct care practice, and we therefore aim to work with people of all identities with compassion and respect.”
As the linebacker-sized non-binary bouncer in the video explains, their work entails making sure doctors don’t “misgender” patients. “Whether you’re looking for something that’s related to medical transition such as hormone, or something completely unrelated like breaking an arm, or going to an ENT,” she explains, every transgender gets a trans concierge when they visit Vanderbilt University Hospital.
Next on screen, a wide-eyed Trans Buddy who looks like she just parachuted a gram of MDMA pops into a frame to explain her sanctioned role in coercing hospital staff to comply with the prevailing gender orthodoxy: “Sometimes I’m there to be sort of always observing kind of how hospital staff are interacting with individuals and again, you know, using correct pronouns.” (emphasis mine)
Via liberal “think tank” Center for American Progress: “Nearly 1 in 2 transgender individuals, including 68 percent of transgender people of color, reported experiencing mistreatment at the hands of a provider.”
1 in 2! Every other transgender who has visited a doctor’s office has been hate-crimed!
Of course, when using the transgender patient’s legal name, which doesn’t correspond to their gender identity (termed “deadnaming,” now illegal in California), is tantamount to “abuse,” it’s easy to inflate the statistics.
Living your life in constant fear, riddled with PTSD, paranoid about saying — or thinking — the wrong thing, and forever apologizing for your bigotry with no way to ever redeem yourself is how they want you.
—————–
Place yourself in a Vanderbilt University Hospital doctor’s shoes for a moment.
Imagine you’re an orthopedic surgeon who got into the medical game to heal broken bones, which you’ve been doing successfully for decades. You’ve got a wall full of diplomas and awards. You love your work and derive substantial satisfaction from it. In large part, it’s your identity.
You don’t pay a lot of attention to politics. Maybe you vote; maybe you don’t. You probably have no idea that rabid ideologues have slowly infiltrated your hospital in a silent coup d’état. You keep your head down and do your job.
Things run smoothly. Patients come and go. Bones heal.
Then, one day, seemingly apropos of nothing, your supervisor, a fresh millennial with a woke MBA, introduces you to a hulking blue-haired, tatted-up Shrek.
On top of that, you’re harangued at every staff meeting to get the latest Pfizer product or risk losing your job because pharmaceutical profits preempt medicine.
