Category: defense & war

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defense & war international affairs subsidy

Paid Invaders

immigration, China, border, wall, fence

“The United States is bankrolling its own ‘invasion,’” declares an Epoch Times article, “by funding the United Nations and its partners, which, in turn, give hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and aid to migrants who eventually cross the U.S. southern border illegally.”

Though it’s called “cash in envelopes” in the biz, actual payments to these immigrants on the road north from Ecuador usually take the form of debit cards, to the tune of $800 per month. This is funded partially from U.S. taxpayers through the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nation’s mass migration arm. Last year, courtesy of Biden Administration enthusiasm, the U.S. threw $1.3 billion at the IOM.

It doesn’t stop there. “The U.N.-orchestrated Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan update for 2024 calls for distributing $1.6 billion in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries with the help of 248 partner agencies, which are also receiving U.S. grants.”

And it is not just the generous payments to individual trekkers northward. NGOs and foreign governments, in addition to the U.S. taxpayers, have organized help through every step of the long march. There is a break in the road, in Panama, where one must navigate  a jungle, or else go by sea. Quite a few organizations are making this leg of the journey doable for many.

And some wonder if the Chinese government isn’t supporting the massive surge — more than 50 times as many Chinese illegally crossing into the U.S. last year than just two years earlier.

Which is where the whole issue becomes scary.

Anthropologist Brett Weinstein — discussed here before for his ordeal at Evergreen University a few years ago — recently went down to Panama to see for himself what was going on. He calls the migrant hordes an invasion. He observed that the Chinese émigrés have separate housing, and exhibit radically different attitudes — and more wealth — than your standard economic migrant worker.

If the obvious danger doesn’t bother Americans … perhaps the fact that they are paying for it might?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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New Red Map

China, map, borders, aggression

“China warns US Has Crossed Red Line” began Newsweek’s headline to a report that the Chinese state-​run Global Times threatens a “brewing and imminent storm of lethal consequences for Taiwan” in retribution for the U.S. recently providing $80 million in military assistance to the island nation. 

China claims Taiwan and its inhabitants, desiring their patriotic company so devoutly as to contemplate leveling much of the country in missile strikes, killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of Taiwanese to achieve that glorious “national rejuvenation.”

Of course, when the U.S. provides defensive weapons to protect against just such a murderous military invasion, the Butchers of Beijing holler it is “provocative!”

Speaking of … the Chinazis were kind enough last week to remind us that Taiwan is hardly the only land they’ve got their eyes on. 

The Communist Party just drew a new map. 

India noticed first that the CCP’s penmanship pinched Indian territory. Japan objected to China’s claim of its Senkaku Islands (under U.S. military protection). 

Countries bordering the South China Sea — Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam — have long complained of China’s ridiculous nine-​dash-​line, claiming roughly 90 percent of the Sea and building militarized islands in the exclusive economic zones of other countries. 

In recent weeks, Chinese ships have used water cannons to block Filipino vessels attempting to resupply their countrymen on an island that international courts have ruled belongs to the Philippines. Two Vietnamese fishermen were injured last week in yet another water cannon attack by the Chinese Coast Guard around the disputed Paracel Islands.

Last week, Vietnam and the United States reached agreement on a “comprehensive strategic partnership” — something Vietnam has with only four other countries, one being China. Why? The Vietnamese see it, analysts tell The Washington Post, as “necessary given how aggressively China is flexing its military muscle in the region.”

This isn’t U.S. saber-​rattling, it’s China rattling its neighbors. 

The threat of war between China and the United States is real … and clearly, not just over Taiwan. The Chinazis marked red lines all over the map. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war international affairs Internet controversy social media

Too Funny or Too On-Target?

China, Youtube, censorship, copyright

Since nobody has noticed or documented a Google policy of banning YouTube videos that are too funny, let’s go with “too on-​target” as the reason that Google deleted a popular YouTube channel, the RutersXiaoFanQi channel, devoted to satirically slapping China autocrat Xi Jinping.

Some of RutersXiaoFanQi’s videos survive in lesser-​known YouTube channels. (Here is one. Here is another.) The approach of the videos seems to be to keep throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Apparently, the ratio of sticking to falling flat was too high for Xi and Google.

Unfair to Google? Maybe. We don’t know what happened behind the scenes.

Did Google just automatically delete the channel after having received a certain number of complaints about copyright violations from Xi’s offices? Or did Google honchos sit around an oak conference table, mull all the variables, and solemnly conclude “We simply must appease the Xi regime!”?

YouTube did not respond to an inquiry from Radio Free Asia about the matter. But RutersXiaoFanQi had received a notice stating that “Your YouTube account has been shut down following repeated copyright warnings,” presumably pertaining to music used in the videos.

It is unlikely, though, that various owners of whatever tunes the channel used bothered to lodge any complaints. It is much more likely that, as RFA speculates, the censors of Xi’s regime are exploiting YouTube’s system for reporting copyright infringements. 

And that Google’s YouTube is taking the easy way out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war government transparency international affairs

Why the Balloon Story Ballooned

UFO, military, weather balloon, defense

“Ruling out aliens? Senior U.S. general says not ruling out anything yet,” ran the Reuters headline. This was over the weekend, “after a series of shoot-​downs of unidentified objects,” Reuters explained, clarifying that for the real information, General Glen VanHerck would defer “to U.S. intelligence experts.”

You know, the people who start wars under false pretenses and hounded a sitting president with a fake dossier about bed-​wetting prostitutes.

While General VanHerck simultaneously up-​played and down-​played extra-​terrestrials, an unnamed source at the Pentagon denied any evidence for the crafts being anything but terrestrial. Sure. But remember the context: last week’s 200-​foot-​tall balloon episode.

“To be clear — The Chinese Balloon was an authentic UFO until it was identified,” tweeted Neil deGrasse Tyson. “It then became an IFO.”

I riffed off that truism when I covered the balloon story, too. But does that explain how quickly a balloon panic became a UFO panic?

Ever since World War II’s foo fighters we’ve had hints that something was not completely “normal” in our skies. But the military has never before boasted of shooting down UFOs — though ufology lore is full of stories about just such events.

VanHerck offers a possible explanation: after the balloon brouhaha, the radar tracking systems were reset to include things less jet-​like and rocket-​like than normal. So other things in the skies that seem anomalous — foo-​fighter-​like? — all of a sudden become serious concerns.

This was one of the reasons given for the founding of modern Pentagon tracking of “UAP”: there may be more than one type of strange “phenomena” flying/​floating/​darting-​about in our skies, and the military should be able to distinguish one from another, especially from novel drone and other surveillance technology.

Especially in time of war.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war general freedom international affairs

Playing With Fire?

Taiwan, war, China

In merely the last month … 

Belligerently attempting to enforce China’s illegal claim to virtually the entire South China Sea, a People’s Liberation Army jet intercepted a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance aircraft over international waters, coming within 20 feet, forcing the U.S. pilot to take evasive action to avoid a crash. 

And a war.

Which China’s continually threatened invasion of Taiwan would definitely precipitate. The sort of military assault that the PLA practiced this week, Reuters reported, sending 57 aircraft and four ships into “the sea and airspace around Taiwan, focused on land strikes and sea assaults.”  

Yet talk of a deadly conflict with China is not limited to Southeast Asia.

“Is India Getting Ready For A War With China?” was the headline of Peter Suciu’s 19fortyfive​.com story last month detailing a clash between these two nuclear-​armed, billion-​plus-​people nations sharing a disputed 2,100-mile border.*

The good news? The world may be waking up to the enormous threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party. 

Japan has announced it will double military spending — and deploy U.S. tomahawk missiles “capable of striking targets deep inside of North Korea and China.” To better counter the Chinazi threat to itself and neighboring Taiwan, the Japanese also have made “path-​breaking” agreements to cooperate with the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

Take a smidgen of comfort, too, in the recent Center for Strategic and International Studies’ war games, which saw Taiwan, Japan and the U.S. “rapidly cripple the Chinese amphibious fleet” in beating back a Chinese invasion of the democratic island nation.

In renewing “its longstanding threat to attack Taiwan,” the CCP warned that foreign countries were “playing with fire.”

Correction: we’re no longer just “playing.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* CNN explained that the tensions between the two countries increased “sharply in June 2020 when hand-​to-​hand fighting … resulted in the deaths of at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers in Aksai Chin-Ladakh.”

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An Invisibility Cloak We Can Use

Chinese invisibility cloak

It’s not quite the magical invisibility cloak worn by Harry Potter. But it’s the next best thing.

Chinese students have created apparel that human eyes can see but that hides the wearer from security cameras and recognition software.

The InvisDefense coat looks ordinary. So it won’t by itself arouse the suspicion of other people on the street. But it is designed in such a way as to foil the kind of cameras that, for example, try to identify who is protesting Chinazi lockdown insanity.

During the day, the printed pattern of the InvisDefense coat blinds cameras. At night, the coat emits heat signals that disrupt infrared. It was invented by Chinese graduate students at Wuhan University under the guidance of computer science professor Wang Zheng. Their coat won first prize in an innovation contest sponsored by Huawei.

Wang observes that “many surveillance devices can detect human bodies. Cameras on the road have pedestrian detection functions. And smart cars can identify pedestrians, roads, and obstacles. Our InvisDefense allows the camera to capture you. But it cannot tell if you are human.…

“We use algorithms to design the least conspicuous patterns that can disable computer vision.”

And the coat costs only seventy bucks or so.

I’m not always a fan of the algorithms. In this case, shout Hooray for algorithms and for those who put them to such good use by inventing the InvisDefense coat. 

I hope these students sell about eight billion of them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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