Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Russia And China Draw 'Red Lines' On Their Borders; US Draws Them On The Other Side Of The Planet

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Reacting to China's announcement that it will be putting forward a proposal for a political settlement to end the war in Ukraine, the US ambassador to the United Nations said that if China begins arming Russia in that conflict this will be a "red line" for the United States.

“We welcome the Chinese announcement that they want peace because that’s what we always want to pursue in situations like this. But we also have to be clear that if there are any thoughts and efforts by the Chinese and others to provide lethal support to the Russians in their brutal attack against Ukraine, that that is unacceptable,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told CNN on Sunday.

“That would be a red line,” she said.
The ambassador's comments pertained to an unsubstantiated claim made by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday that China is "considering providing lethal support to Russia in the war against Ukraine," according to US intelligence. 

The US has been making evidence-free claims in relation to China arming Russia against Ukraine since the war began. In March of last year the New York Times reported that "Russia asked China to give it military equipment and support for the war in Ukraine after President Vladimir V. Putin began a full-scale invasion last month, according to U.S. officials." Then in April of last year NBC reported that this claim "lacked hard evidence" and was essentially just a lie the US government told the media "as part of an information war against Russia."

The mass media have eagerly participated in promoting this latest re-emergence of narratives about China supplying weapons to Russia, with the Wall Street Journal running a piece just the other day titled "Chinese Drones Still Support Russia’s War in Ukraine, Trade Data Show." But as commentator Matthew Petti has observed, buried deep in that article is an acknowledgement that these China-made camera drones aren't even coming from China; they're being purchased by Russian middlemen in nations like the United Arab Emirates. Really it's just a story about how China manufactures a lot of products, disguised as something scandalous.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin knocked back Blinken's claims at a press conference shortly after they were made, saying the US is in no position to be accusing anyone of pouring arms into the war.

“It is the US, not China, that has been pouring weapons into the battlefield," he said. "The US is in no position to tell China what to do. We would never stand for finger-pointing, or even coercion and pressurizing from the US on our relations with Russia.”
Indeed, Washington is warning Beijing with a "red line" against doing something that Washington does constantly, and is currently doing to an unprecedented extent in Ukraine. The US sends weapons to proxy forces all over the world, including to Saudi Arabia in facilitation of its mass atrocities in Yemen, to Al Qaeda and its aligned forces in facilitation of the western dirty war on Syria, and to Israel in facilitation of its apartheid regime and its nonstop attacks on its neighbors. Ukraine is Washington's biggest proxy warfare operation yet, so it's a bit rich for it to be drawing "red lines" on the other side of the planet regarding an activity the US spent $113 billion on last year.

And that's the major difference between the US and nations like Russia and China. When Russia and China draw red lines, it's at their own borders and regards their own national security interests. When the US draws red lines, it's far from its own borders and unrelated to the security of the nation.

During the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine, Putin warned over and over again that the west was taking Moscow’s “red lines” on Ukrainian neutrality too lightly, and Washington brazenly dismissed those warnings while continuing to float the possibility of future NATO membership for Ukraine.

“I don’t accept anybody’s red lines,” President Biden told the press in December of 2021 when asked about the warnings.

Weeks later Putin made good on his threat, launching a horrific war that could easily have been prevented with a little diplomacy and sensibility.

“This is that red line that I talked about multiple times,” Putin said. “They have crossed it.”
Similarly, Beijing has been using the phrase "red line" with regard to Taiwan and the US empire's rapidly escalating provocations on that front. China used it multiple times last year warning against then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island, which Beijing regards as an egregious violation of Washington's One China policy. As Antiwar's Dave DeCamp frequently notes, this marked the beginning a new level of hostilities from Beijing which now sees frequent military crossings of the median line between Taiwan and mainland China that weren't commonplace before.

Whether you agree with Moscow and Beijing about their "red lines" or not, you must concede that there's a very big difference between the way they draw them and the way the US makes use of that concept. Russia and China are issuing these warnings about the areas immediately adjacent to their own territory, while the US issues them to anyone it likes about what they are permitted to do with their neighbors, even when the US itself engages in those very activities all the time.

Washington literally thinks of this entire planet as its territory. It believes it is its divinely bestowed right to issue decrees about what may and may not be done anywhere in the world, and that any transgression against these decrees is an act of aggression against it. 

We see this evidenced in the way US officials talk about the world. Just in January of last year President Biden said that "everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.” That same month then-Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked on the mounting tensions around Ukraine that it is in America’s interest to support “our eastern flank countries”, which might come as a surprise to those who were taught in school that America’s eastern flank was not eastern Europe but the eastern coastline of the United States. You'll see the imperial media refer to things like the vague prospect of China maybe someday building a military base in the African nation of Equatorial Guinea as a menacing encroachment upon America's "backyard".
It's just so crazy how the US government has the temerity to publicly rend its garments in outrage over foreign nations making demands about what happens on their own borders while it continually makes demands about what happens everywhere in the world. It wails and moans about its enemies asserting small "spheres of influence" over former Soviet states or the South China Sea, while it itself asserts a sphere of influence that looks like planet Earth.

Whenever you point out how the US is the worst offender in any area it criticizes other governments for you'll find yourself accused of "whataboutism", but what this actually means is that you have highlighted evidence that the US does not play by its own rules and does not actually value the issues it's trying to moralize about. The US is not trying to stop foreign nations from bullying and dominating their neighbors, it's trying to bash out more space for itself to bully and dominate the world.

Reprinted with permission from Caitlin's Newsletter.
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America the Feckless

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One would think that the United States military staging an unprovoked “plausibly deniable” covert attack on a nation with which it is not at war would be at least considered newsworthy. That the attack did grave damage to a country with which the US is closely allied would seem to make the aggression even more unthinkable. And, perhaps worst of all, that the attack was set up by the nation’s chief executive using a political bypass that avoided congressional oversight and adherence to the war powers act which might be most reprehensible of all as it cuts to the heart of the nation’s constitutional balance of powers. It is clearly an impeachable offense. And “Yes,” for those who are still wondering, Joe Biden and his team of terrorist emulators have done all that and more, and have capped their performance with a series of flat out lies and evasions to make it appear that they had done nothing wrong.

And the mainstream America media, in its worst performance since the invasion of Iraq, has served as an echo chamber for everything the White House chooses to leak to it. Given all of that, it was perhaps completely predictable that the government-subservient press and TV news would almost completely ignore the devastating report released by top investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on February 8th. Hersh’s article was entitled “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline” with a secondary headline reading “The New York Times called it a ‘mystery,’ but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now.” The article, which Hersh self-published on the internet, describes in considerable detail the preparations and execution by the US Navy Diving and Salvage Center and Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Maritime Branch, coordinated and directed by the White House, to sabotage and destroy Russia’s four Baltic Sea Nord Stream gas pipelines, a war crime and terroristic action that moves the United States much closer to direct armed conflict with Russia.

Given its potential political blowback, the Hersh story might very well be the most important expose to appear since fighting began in Ukraine over a year ago, but it is being ignored by the White House, which is denying the report, with a spokesman only commenting that “This is false and complete fiction.” The CIA’s spokesman Tammy Thorp likewise replied to Hersh that “This claim is completely and utterly false.” The US Navy was also asked for comments but did not respond. The media, clearly evident by its inaction, has religiously adhered to that government line, possibly due to some mistaken notion that our national security forces have to be supported when they are going “toe to toe with the Russkies” over Ukraine. On the contrary, it is precisely when the government is behaving recklessly not to mention criminally to bring about an unnecessary war that the press should be in hot pursuit of the story and what it means. That is particularly so as the Ukraine conflict is now escalating and threatening to go nuclear as both sides dig in to incompatible positions.

I have known Sy Hersh for a number of years and spent time together with him and other former CIA colleagues helping to confirm details of some of his earlier exposes on US government abuses and outright lies in its somewhat not completely credible role as “guardian” of national security. Hersh is a meticulous investigator who never, in my experience, accepted uncorroborated claims in support of his narratives. I have some understanding of who his sources in the intelligence agencies and Department of Defense might be in this case and it should be accepted that what he has written is completely verifiable and derived from individuals who were actual participants in the activities described. That is not to say that there will not be failures to recall accurately certainly details including aspects of the possible Norwegian involvement, something critics are already pointing to, but the main thrust of “whodunit” and “how” is pretty definitively demonstrated.

The report is long and includes a great deal of information on both the planning and the political decision-making that went into the willingness to destroy the pipeline, which I will briefly describe. Sy claims the following: It has not exactly been a secret that many in the United States government have long regarded the Nord Stream pipelines to be a security threat as the supply of relatively cheap natural gas to Germany as a gateway into Europe by Russia would enable Moscow to create a dependency on it for energy which could be manipulated to produce political and strategic advantage.

As the crisis over Ukraine deepened in 2021, the Biden White House set up a secret task force that worked on possible scenarios that focused on using military and intelligence resources to physically destroy the pipelines with some measure of plausible denial of the US hand in the process in order to avoid political blowback from America’s European allies or escalation of the conflict. The secrecy was needed to protect Biden from charges of hypocrisy since he had repeatedly pledged that the US would not be directly involved in any armed conflict with Russia over Ukraine.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan headed the interagency task force, which convened throughout late 2021 and included key players from the Agency’s Maritime Branch and the Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center, both located in Panama City Florida, as well as the State Department, Treasury and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The operation was originally treated as a covert action that would have required congressional oversight, but that fig leaf was abandoned and it became a “highly classified intelligence operation” when Biden and others in the administration stated publicly and clearly their intentions to stop the pipeline, making what eventually took place an openly declared policy, perhaps intended to send a warning to the Russians. A number of options to destroy the pipelines were discussed. According to Hersh, the participants in the meeting, many of whom were hawks who had cut their teeth under the Obama Administration, clearly understood that they were proposing an “act of war” that was being considered in spite of potential blowback because the president had ordered it.

There was plenty of warning of what might be coming. In early February 2022, shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Biden publicly pledged during a joint news conference accompanied by a silent and frowning German chancellor Olav Scholz that “If Russia invades … there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2” and, when pressed on how he would carry that out, he responded, “We will — I promise you — we will be able to do it.” Later, after the destruction of the pipeline, Secretary of State Blinken stated that) the sabotage offered a “tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy… That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come.” Not that any more confirmation was needed, but on January 22nd 2023 Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland gloated while testifying to a US Senate committee that “the administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now … a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

The Biden Administration, in its arrogance has more-or-less been admitting that it was behind the sabotage, which it certainly had the motive and means to carry out, though it was carefully avoiding leaving any actual evidence behind that it had carried out the destruction. As observed above, it has also been deliberately avoiding any congressional involvement, presumably to avoid any discussion of war powers or even due to concerns over possible media leaks.

The mechanics of the placing explosives followed by the actual destruction of the pipelines was reportedly as follows: Under cover of a NATO Baltic Sea exercisecalled BALTOPS-22 in June 2022 US Navy and possibly also CIA Special Activities and Norwegian deep sea divers descended 260 feet to a spot off the Danish Island of Bornholm, which was considered to be a location where the pipelines converged in relatively shallow tide-free water and were particularly vulnerable. They attached C-4 explosives both to Nord Stream 1, which was operational, and Nord Stream 2, which was completed but was waiting for German safety and security regulators’ approval to become active. The explosives were designed to be remotely detonatable.

The explosives were on a timer that created an escape window for those initiating the detonation and were reported to be activated by a secure signal sent by a sonar buoy that was dropped onto the prepared site by a Norwegian navy helicopter. The Norwegians were essential in that role due to their own military presence close to the targeted part of the Baltic as well as their considerable experience in deep-sea cold-water operations. A Norwegian Navy helicopter in the area would presumably arouse no particular concern, even from the ever-watchful Russians.

Under orders to “Go!” from Washington, on September 26, 2022 the Norwegians dropped the sonar buoy and a few hours later the C-4 explosives were detonated, immediately knocking out three of the four pipelines. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the US and its allies in the media made every effort to blame the Russians who were repeatedly cited as a likely culprit. Leaks from the White House and from the British government never established a clear explanation of why Moscow would be into self-sabotage of a lucrative business arrangement. A few months later, when it was revealed that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the Nord Streams, in the neighborhood of $10 billion, the New York Times seemingly cluelessly described the development as “complicating theories about who was behind” the sabotage.

Indeed, it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own valuable pipeline which was intended to be a major income source for many years to come, a proposition that former British diplomat Craig Murray describes as “deranged.” But a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken. Asked at a press conference in September about the consequences of the worsening global energy crisis, most felt in Western Europe, a delusional Blinken described the development in positive terms, enthusing how the destruction would “take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.”

The tale told by Sy Hersh is yet another great betrayal by the country’s so-called leadership, an egregious example of the United States government aided by its lap-dog media again lying to its own citizens and the world to cover-up a criminal act that in no way made Americans safer or more prosperous. In the US, the gadfly Tucker Carlson, among prominent journalists, has up to this point dared to present the investigative account developed by Hersh in a five-minute segment of his program. Newsweek has also run a piece examining the issues raised featuring Constitutional lawyer John Yoo. More interesting perhaps, a half hour interview of Hersh by Amy Goodman on PBS television’s Democracy Now! aired last week but then was partially blocked because YouTube considered it to be “inappropriate or offensive.” The full availability of the Seymour Hersh interview video has since that time been restored with the Democracy Now! channel providing the following explanatory message: “UPDATE: We have blurred some imagery about 30 seconds into the video in response to a content warning from YouTube that severely limited the reach of this interview. What you see now is an edited version. For the uncensored version of this interview that aired on our show, visit democracynow.org.”

Beyond that exposure, there remain, nevertheless, a lot of questions about the destruction of Nord Stream, which was unambiguously an act of war or even terrorism, that continue to be unanswered. Consider, for example, how NATO countries, the US and Norway, de facto attacked fellow NATO country Germany, which was both the intended recipient and an economic partner in the pipelines. Though some British involvement in the operation, also detected by Russian intelligence, was quickly revealed publicly by then-British Prime Minister Elizabeth Truss’s “It’s done” text to Secretary of State Antony Blinken sixty seconds after the detonation. Berlin apparently was not trusted enough to have a voice in the planning and execution of the bombing even though it was gravely damaged by it. Also, Article 5 of the NATO charter says an attack on one nation requires all other alliance members to aid the country that was targeted and it is intriguing to consider whether the rest of NATO ought to go to war with the United States and Norway. Alternatively, can “friends” in the defensive alliance attack each other without consequences or ought the US and Norway now be considered rogue nations? Will the alliance itself be able to stay together if several member states take steps unilaterally that can severely damage the economy of another member? And how are the Germans actually responding to their sinking economy and standards of living, with closing factories and cold houses as a consequence of the US/Norwegian action?

Americans, for their part, should also be thinking deeply about the government we have and the lack of restraint with which it behaves. The framers of the Constitution gave only to Congress the power to declare war, perhaps imagining that at some future date the president might stoop to using the military and naval forces of the United States globally to punish and coerce other nations, seize their territory, and kill their people. And it is all justified by something called “exceptionalism” empowering a massive sustained deception that waging continuous war is actually keeping the peace in a “rules based international order.”

But the final, and biggest, question remains: How will Russia retaliate to Nord Stream? Will it be one step closer to possible nuclear war initiated by Joe Biden’s reckless move or will the Kremlin persist with its request to have the United Nations Security Council investigate the incident? Moscow will certainly be careful to pick the right time and place, but the last act in this play surely remains to be written.

Reprinted with permission from Unz.com.

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The Inflation and Tax Assault on the American People

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According to the January report of the Consumer Price Index, price inflation increased by 0.5 percent last month. This follows a 0.1 percent increase in December. The total increase over the last 12 months is 6.4 percent. The official government statistics, which are manipulated to understate the true rate of price inflation, show even greater increases in some costs. Over the last 12 months, food prices increased by 10.1 percent, energy prices increased by 8.7 percent, and shelter costs rose by 7.9 percent.

The government’s figures also record a 0.2 percent decline in real wages in January and a 1.8 percent decline from a year earlier. Keep in mind that actual real wages losses have been larger because the government’s real wage numbers are calculated using the government’s understated price inflation numbers. The Federal Reserve-caused decline in purchasing power disproportionally harms middle- and lower-income Americans, many of whom were already living paycheck to paycheck before the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented money creation caused especially large increases in price inflation.

According to a Morning Consult survey from June of 2022, price inflation has caused over 40 percent of US consumers to eat out less. This obviously reduces the opportunity of wait staff to earn tips that constitute a significant portion of their incomes. This loss is in addition to the lost income from during the coronavirus scare, when many restaurants either closed entirely or only offered takeout or delivery.

The reduction in tip income is not stopping the Internal Revenue Service from trying to squeeze more taxes out of waiters and waitresses. The tax agency has announced this month the creation of the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program. As the name suggests, the program will allow the tax agency to collect data on tips directly from restaurants, instead of relying on employees to report their tips.

SITCA is one of the first initiatives to use some of the 80 billion dollars in additional funding provided to the IRS in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. President Biden and other supporters of the legislation said the funds were to enable the IRS to crack down on millionaire and billionaire “tax cheats.” President Biden and the bureaucrats running the IRS must think there are a lot of waiters and waitresses making billions in tips.

At the time of the bill’s passage, many opponents of increasing the IRS’s enforcement budget predicted the agency would use the additional funds to target middle- and lower-income Americans. After all, unlike wealthier individuals, these Americans cannot afford tax attorneys and accountants to make sure they minimize their tax liability without violating the tax law. Also, wealthy taxpayers are more likely (and able) to fight an IRS audit. In contrast, lower income Americans are more likely to pay whatever the tax agency demands in order to make it go away since they don’t have the resources to fight it.

When I was in Congress, I introduced legislation to make tips tax free. Tips are a gift provided by customers to show appreciation to servers. Very rarely is there a contractual obligation for a customer to add a tip (much less a pre-determined amount) to his bill. There is no reason to tax tips other than the government’s desire to take more money from working people.

The fact that the funding the IRS was given to prevent the wealthy from avoiding taxes is actually being used to target waiters is an example of how the welfare-warfare state harms working Americans. At the same time, lower- and middle-income Americans are harmed the most by the Federal Reserve’s inflation tax. The best thing Congress could do to help Americans improve their standard of living and climb the economic ladder is to kill the monsters of 1913 — the Federal Reserve and the IRS.

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Speeches from the Sunday Rally in Washington, DC Opposing US Involvement in the Ukraine War

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On Sunday, a collection of opponents of the United States government’s involvement in the Ukraine War spoke at a rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. The event titled Rage Against the War Machine, included speakers who hold differing views on many political matters but agree that the US government should end its involvement in the war.

Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Founder and Chairman Ron Paul spoke. So also did Daniel McAdams, the institute’s executive director. You can watch Paul’s speech here and McAdams’s speech here. Check out additional speeches from the event here.

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2023/february/20/speeches-from-the-sunday-rally-in-washington-dc-opposing-us-involvement-in-the-ukraine-war/
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Saturday, February 18, 2023

Disqualified: when Covid tyranny devastated America, Nikki Haley was nowhere to be found

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Nikki Haley announced yesterday to her handful of fans that she is running for president of the United States.
Haley swears that she is a legit contender, though her speech made it sound more like she is running for the board of Raytheon. Noticeably absent from her speech, in which she declared Russia and China as “enemies” of America, was any mention of our own government’s attacks on our fundamental freedoms.

Even if Nikki Haley was running purely as a foreign policy candidate (in a nation where domestic issue far surpass foreign issues in importance), her international platform is best described someone in desperate need of a “firmware update.”
For better or worse, the era of Covid hysteria gave Americans a lot of insight into the true nature of our political class. It separated those who seek to protect the rights of their constituents and those who seek power for the sake of obtaining power, and end up dominating their constituents. Though arguably a manufactured hysteria, the Covid era forced everyone to flip over their cards.

Nikki Haley was not only nowhere to be found on the most impactful human rights issue of her time, but it’s worse than that. She quickly became part of the problem. Nowhere during a social media search could I find even a light critique of Covid tyranny or the mRNA Big Pharma mafia. Just a few months ago, Haley was a featured speaker at an event in New York requiring both proof of “vaccines” AND boosters.
Instead of standing with the people, Haley took a back seat to the fastest roll up of power in American history and instead stood with the corporate and political interests of her 16+ billionaire donors. The problem with being owned by over a dozen billionaires is that Haley is in no position to upset that gigantic apple cart. She can only, in robotic fashion, critique “socialism” or “China” or another vague issue without getting into any real detail, without having any real plan of action to make real change.

The former South Carolina governor has launched a half-baked campaign that seems like another shameless appeal for donations, so that Nikki Haley can continue to fly private jets, maintain the six-figure a pop bumper sticker slogan speaking circuit, and launder her donors’ influence into another cushy no-show public or private gig.
Nikki Haley is just not qualified to be president. She failed the all-important Covid test. Similar to Haley’s political idol in Hillary Clinton, her ruthless pursuit of power and lifelong goal of maintaining a closer and closer proximity to power above all else is what disqualifies her most.

By all indications, Haley is a nice person, and she has a reputation as a decent human being, but America needs a president who is much more than a kind person. America needs a president who is willing and able to take on and take down the ruling class, not one who is beholden to the blob.

Reprinted with permission from The Dossier.
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Friday, February 17, 2023

The US May Have Shot Down a Small Hobby Balloon With a Sidewinder Missile

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President Biden on Thursday acknowledged that the three unidentified objects he ordered the US military to shoot down were likely harmless weather balloons.

“The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research,” Biden said.

Following the panic caused by the Chinese balloon that floated over the United States, US fighter jets shot down unidentified objects on February 10, 11, and 12 using heat-seeking AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles, which are worth over $400,000 apiece.

Biden said the military was still working to collect the debris. “Our military and the Canadian military are seeking to recover the debris so we can learn more about these three objects,” he said.

According to a report from Aviation Week, at least one of the objects may have been a hobby balloon reported missing by a club in Illinois that launches small balloons with tracking devices that are capable of traveling the globe at high altitudes.

The club, the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB), said its balloon was last reported off the coast of Alaska on February 10, and tracking data projected that it would be floating over Canada’s Yukon Territory on February 11, the same day a US F-22 shot down an object in the area.

The balloon they launched is known as a “pico balloon,” a small silver-coated party-style balloon that carries a transmitter. A Pentagon memo described the object that was shot down over Canada as a “small, metallic balloon with a tethered payload below it.”
Canadian authorities said the object that was shot down was traveling at “approximately 40,000 feet.” When the NIBBB’s balloon was last reported, it was floating at 38,910 feet.

The NIBBB isn’t blaming the US government for shooting down its balloon yet and sometimes the transmitters turn off for a few days, but they think it’s a real possibility. Ron Meadows, the founder of Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS), a company that makes pico balloons, told Aviation Week that he tried to contact the government to tell them they were likely shooting these balloons down.

“I tried contacting our military and the FBI—and just got the runaround—to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are. And they’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down,” Meadows said. According to Aviation Week, the pico balloons can usually be purchased for between $12-180 each, depending on the type.

Rocky Mountain Ham Radio, another group that launches hobby balloons, describes the pico balloons as “a 3-foot mylar foil party balloon, filled partially with ultra-pure helium, and carrying a 13-gram solar-powered APRS transmitter. The balloon is intended to travel for long distances (not to achieve heights) and is not intended to be recovered. These balloons have literally circumnavigated the globe — even multiple times — before finally descending.”

Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.

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Thursday, February 16, 2023

New Poll: US Support For Ukraine Continues To Evaporate

A new AP/NORC poll shows that support among Americans - of all political persuasion - for continued involvement in the Russia/Ukraine war continues to crater, suggesting increasing political risk for politicians who continue to toe the Biden Administration line. Also today: UN Security Council will take up allegations that the US blew up Nord Stream pipeline. Finally: A secret Fauci meeting on natural immunity? Damar Hamlin declines to say what stopped his heart. Watch today's Liberty Report:



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