Boots & Sabers

The blogging will continue until morale improves...

Owen

Everything but tech support.
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1615, 03 Apr 23

Spy Balloon Worked

I was assured that this wouldn’t happen.

The Chinese spy balloon that flew across the U.S. was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to block it from doing so, according to two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official.

 

China was able to control the balloon so it could make multiple passes over some of the sites (at times flying figure-eight formations) and transmit the information it collected back to Beijing in real time, the three officials said. The intelligence China collected was mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons systems or include communications from base personnel, rather than images, the officials said.

 

The three officials said China could have gathered much more intelligence from sensitive sites if not for the administration’s efforts to move around potential targets and obscure the balloon’s ability to pick up their electronic signals by stopping them from broadcasting or emitting signals.

So… our president allowed the Chinese to spy on us. When caught, we didn’t do anything about it. Who is he working for?

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1615, 03 April 2023

11 Comments

  1. Merlin

    >Who is he working for?

    Certainly not the American people and they don’t care whether you realize it or not. What you going to do about it? Not vote for them? They aren’t concerned about that anymore either. They behave like they’re untouchable. Kinda like they know something you don’t.

  2. Mike

    China plays the long game. They have decimated our manufacturing base. They use the cartels to traffic drugs to our youth. They have flooded the country with electronics filled with malware. They are working to destroy our power infrastructure with green energy mandates.

    Now they blatantly collect sigint over our country with the tacit consent of our president and military leaders.

  3. dad29

    They have decimated our manufacturing base.

    No, Mike, people like the former chairman of Briggs & Stratton (Sheily) and the former chairman of Chrysler Corp (who shipped Jeep manufacture over there) did that. THEY chose to ship the jobs to China to enhance their bottom line. And–in the case of Briggs–let’s not hear any crapola about “hard-ass Union’ because that’s not true. THEY chose to let China take 51% ownership of the JV’s over there, thus giving China all the engineering drawings. THEY chose to favor a murderous regime, with full knowledge of its one-child and Uighur policies, for a few points pre-tax.

    They were early entries in the Make America Last!! contest. Many more have followed, under the same terms.

    China was perfectly happy to rape them later (and they did, by the way).

  4. Merlin

    Yep. That long game goes all the way back to at least the run-up to the 1996 Chinagate scandal of the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign and the DNC’s love of fundraising from the China lobby. Good old Janet Reno did a pretty good job back then of insulating the Dem beneficiaries from the consequences that fell on their Chinese benefactors. There was a bit of political exposure, but the money was just too good to actually put a stop to the practice of foreign influence peddling. Some folks are above the law… and everyone knows it. There’s not much point in continuing to pretend otherwise.

  5. dad29

    Ah, yes!! AlGore’s tens of thousands in contributions from Chinese “buddhist” nuns!!

    Clinton–facing bankruptcy in his PRIMARY campaign, getting bailed out by Chinese cash from an Arkansas Chinese restaurant owner……..

    The good old days. Then Clinton’s grant of World Trade membership to China followed by Bush the Dumber’s MFN (PNTR) status.

    If it were only Bai-Den, things would be easier, right?

  6. Merlin

    As Willy Jeff’s influence waned VP Joe Biden stepped into that lucrative vacuum. They don’t call him China Joe for nothing. Also interesting is the fact that the Biden influence peddling in Ukraine seems to have been with Russian proxies (mafia-types) simply operating out of Ukraine. A thinking person might wonder just where all of the money being shoveled into Ukraine over the past year is really ending up.

  7. dad29

    A thinking person might wonder just where all of the money being shoveled into Ukraine over the past year is really ending up.

    A thinking person knows it is not in weapons systems, small arms, and ammo controlled by Ukraine–or at least, not for long. It is also not in “pension” accounts for retired Ukrainian civil servants. But there are some pretty nice “pensions” disguised as mansions and 200-foot yachts (like the one Owen piloted) around the world’s pleasure spots.

  8. Mike

    “No, Mike, people like the former chairman of Briggs & Stratton (Sheily) and the former chairman of Chrysler Corp (who shipped Jeep manufacture over there) did that.”

    Kind of hard to compete when you are fighting not only Chinese subsidized pricing but also our ever more restrictive EPA. We could have kept our manufacturing here under reasonable environmental regulations but extremists pushing for perfect drove manufacturing to less restrictive countries. A reasonable approach would have been much better for the environment overall.

  9. Tuerqas

    I agree Mike, a ‘few points’ to the bottom line to move back then or a bucket of lost points since then to stay here as the US Government continues to make manufacturing harder and harder so owners will just get out.
    And from a programmed and short sighted climate changer’s idiot dream, it has worked nationally. We do put less crap into the air than we used to, it is just being poured over China’s part of the world now. No net gain for the world, but it is no longer in our backyard…just ignore all the extra plastic that goods have been wrapped in to get here. Libs are fixing our skies right now, not our seas.

  10. dad29

    Kind of hard to compete when you are fighting not only Chinese subsidized pricing but also our ever more restrictive EPA.

    Actually, as Donald Trump proved, it’s not hard when the President swats the competition with tariffs.

    But to your point: it’s not just EPA. It’s Social Security, Medicare, “DEI” personnel policy, unemployment comp, worker-injury comp, zoning, building codes…………..we can go on. NONE of them are present in Red China. All you have to do is grease the local palms, and *voila*!! you have a factory, a workforce, and everybody go home happy.

    We can agree that many US imperatives are ineffective, heavy-handed, overly costly, and/or destructive to industry.

    So which of the programs above–aside from EPA–are you going to terminate?

  11. dad29

    By the way, a Bay View drop-forge is under attack from the neighboring residents because “it is too loud.”

    So happens we lived a few blocks from that forge for several years. It was loud. But in reality, you get used to it and eventually you don’t really hear it unless you want to.

    Seeing as it’s Milwaukee, my bet is that the forge will be gone in 5-10 years at the most, taking all 250 jobs with it. And they might go to China, I suppose. Is that the BEST resolution for the US as a whole?

    Hell, no.

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