AMERICAN CULTURE IS OFFICIALLY LOSING IT

     So, as predicted this has been an 'interesting' week in the news. The nominal Heads-of-State in the US and Canada seem to be playing a high-level arcade game of shooting balloons. The score so far is Biden 3, Trudeau 1. When all of these objects were shot down, nobody in the Pentagon actually knew what they were; but acting first and thinking later seems to be how Americans operate these days. The Pentagon didn't even rule out the idea that the craft were extraterrestrial in origin: I can't imagine that killing citizens of a highly advanced civilization is a smart idea, but I'm presumed to know nothing, not having gone to West Point. We can all rest easy, since we now know that one was a Chinese weather balloon (since China admitted to that one). Two of the other three have been identified as a weather balloon operated by the US National Weather Service and the other a test balloon released by a ballooning club in Chicago. 

   The Super Bowl was predictable too: having watched enough World Wrestling Federation matches in my youth, one can fairly accurately guess how postmodern-era NFL games are going to come out. I didn't watch the spectacle; but surprisingly the halftime show wasn't as weirdly cultish as usual (relatively speaking of course) other than having pregnant celebrity as its centerpiece. Apparently there was also an ad run at some point that portrayed Jesus that some interpreted as too positive, bringing down the ire of Congressional Democrats. Meanwhile, an NFL player named Juju (no really, his real name) arrived at the game wearing a dress. 

   On the subject of praying and Congress; the media has been hyping mass-shootings again this week. After yet another suspiciously timed and executed shooting at Michigan State University, an exasperated State Legislator pushed the 'Berserk Button' online and demanded that people stop praying and pass more gun laws. Not to be outdone, Left-Wing Whacko extraordinaire Keith Olbermann called for an economic civil war against so-called 'Red States.' 

   I can't help but think that it's got to be the drugs. Decades now of high-potency pot; prescription SSRI's and over-prescriptions of opioids, amphetamines, and barbiturates---not to mention ever more potent street drugs and God-only-knows-what toxins are dumped into processed foods may indeed be the reason behind what is now obviously a national Nervous Breakdown bordering on outright Schizophrenia. 

   People, especially those of the Boomer and Gen X ages ought to reflect on this very carefully. At the turn of the last century, did any of us imagine that less than 25 years into the future, we'd be panicking over weather balloons and influenza outbreaks to the point where it became a National Security issue? Did we envision hideous men winning beauty contests and NFL stars wearing dresses at the Super Bowl? Who among us predicted that going to Church would be equated with Right-Wing Extremism or that migrant sharecroppers picking strawberries in California would be believed to be spearheading an invasion of the United States? 

  It's gotten so bad that the foreign press is openly starting to ask serious questions about it---questions that our media ought to be asking. Actually, it was starting to become apparent just a few years ago. President Trump was making actual progress in turning back our national problem with drug abuse, and we saw the first significant decline in overdose deaths in years. But 'Orange Man Bad' and today we're back to---and exceeding--- pre-2016 levels of drug-related fatalities. It's isn't even the fatalities that are the whole problem: it's the increasingly self-evident effects on the human mind of the survivors. The article cited above noted that in 2008:

  “Once psychiatrists started putting ‘hyperactive’ children on Ritalin, they started to see prepubertal children with manic symptoms. Same thing happened when psychiatrists started prescribing antidepressants to children and teenagers. A significant percentage had manic or hypomanic reactions to the antidepressants. And then these children and teenagers are put on heavier duty drugs, including drug cocktails, often do not respond favorably to treatment and deteriorate. And that is a major reason for the 35-fold increase between 1987 and 2007 of children classified as being disabled by mental disorders."

    So it isn't exactly as though Americans didn't know what was going on or where any of this was likely to lead. As another indicator, consider that there have been nearly 16,000 overdoses in the US Military over the last five years, 332 of them fatal. As the study released by China showed that, while the MSM is pushing gun violence onto the front pages, the death toll from narcotics overdoses is eight times higher than deaths from firearms. The Chinese experts attributed the reason behind our addiction rates is "social malaise" which is probably not far from the truth. 

   My own feeling is that this is part of a deliberate Strategy of Tension, whereby the Elites are intentionally fomenting mass-hysteria, fear, chaos, despair, violence, and general insanity to obtain a strong enough plurality of Americans to demand a dictatorship simply to restore order. Before the rent-a-skeptic crowd begins knee-slapping and hooting about tin-foil hats, read this poll first and prepare to eat crow. Bear in mind that the source here is not exactly a site that tends to lean Conservative. Their findings? "Anti-democratic statements are embraced by members of both U.S. parties, but more commonly by Republicans. For example, around 90% of Republicans would support tough leaders who crack down on groups that “undermine American values” – however the survey respondents define those values. More than half of Democrats take the same position."

   In an upcoming article, we'll break down these poll numbers and analyze it in further detail. But for now, we should see the drug problem as part of a larger issue that is systematically dragging down our culture. Others have noted that breaking down of traditional institutions like religion and family are contributing factors; but we also have to understand the breakdown of these personal support networks is part of the same deliberate strategy. If the end goal is to coerce the populace into accepting a dictatorship, then obviously undermining alternative support networks---family, faith, community, and education---is to the Elites' advantage. 

    

   

THIS IS JUST SICK

    Once upon a time, an American Conservative was someone who stood for American values. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Faith, Family, and Freedom. Equality Before the Law. Fair Play, Competition, and Free Enterprise. 

   Then, somewhere along the line, the Right lost its way. Greed, selfishness, and cruelty became virtuous. Manipulating the system and the pursuit of power replaced reasoned debate and leading by example. Force and fraud became good policy while a mockery was made of friendship and faith and the value of a single human life. We hardly need to give examples: anyone who's watched the last 30 years of a movement built by the likes of Reagan and Buckley degenerate into the moral Anarchism of today's Republican Party has seen it. The last 10-20 years have been especially bad; the rise of the Red Pill Cult with its nihilistic the ends justify any means philosophy; human beings translated into human capital---all the way down to having a sexual market value and the recent displays of governors using migrants as show-props. Our system was predicated on the Right of free men to choose from among them representatives best qualified to administer a free State and safeguard those freedoms; not bowing to some 'Alpha' like a bunch of savages dancing around their war-chief. 

    As if we needed any further proof of the level to which 2023 'Conservatism' has sunk, Eric Lendrum, one of the pundits of the 'New Right' wrote this disgusting article published on a leading 'Conservative' website---a site which seems to be degenerating exponentially into White Supremacy, Nihilism, and the Cult of the Alpha Superman. We'll have more to say about Mr. Lendrum presently, but first the problems with his thinking.

   Now the background to this story is that crowdsourcing platform GoFundMe refused funding for the legal defense of an Arizona man facing 1st Degree Murder Charges and $1 million bail for allegedly killing a migrant who was trespassing on his property. Lendrum is all in a knot over this; foaming about "the left-wing crowdfunding website...has shut down all fundraisers for an Arizona cattle rancher who defended his property by killing an illegal alien, thus leaving him and his wife to bear the financial burden of the coming legal battle," which---the last time I checked was the right of a company to set its own Terms of Use. Especially in this case because GoFundMe is not a monopoly and Lendrum even mentions other sites where donations can be made. 

   This type of promoting a Conservative version of Cancel Culture is disturbing enough: but what's particularly chilling about this article is that Lendrum seems more outraged over one company's refusal to fund a legal defense than he is about the actual circumstances involved in the crime. Remember here that we're not talking about some 'woke' Liberal county in California where people don't even stop robberies because they think it's too mean. We're talking about Santa Cruz County Arizona---where the sheriffs don't exactly have a reputation for being anti-2nd Amendment. Arizona, in fact, has some of the most lenient gun and self-defense laws; and for them to charge someone with premeditated murder should imply that something a little more than self-defense was involved here. 

  In fact, there is a lot more to this story. The suspect, George Alan Kelly, is portrayed by Lendrum as "an Arizona cattle rancher who defended his property by killing an illegal alien," and by his shady alternative fundraiser as "a simple farmer, who should be protected by the government, has been abandoned and had to defend himself. That is bad enough, but the government that caused this, now wishes to persecute him.”

      

    We get a little different picture of things by hearing what the police and other officials actually said. According to the police, on January 30th, there were shots fired at a fleeing group around 3 P.M. in Kino Springs, (a 20 year old subdivision of Nogales, Arizona; and not a ranch passed down from generation to generation as is being assumed). Police found nothing at the time (which also doesn't seem to square very neatly with the narrative of an out-of-control 'invasion' going on). They received a second call of 'shots fired' in the same area about three hours later. A half-hour's search found the body of 48-year old Gabriel Cuen-Butimea (yes these migrants actually do have names), a resident of Nogales, Mexico---a few hours' walk from the border. 

   Cuen-Butimea was unarmed, and was 150 yards from Kelly's house when he was shot---according to some sources in the back. Police matched the bullet to a gun Kelly owned, stating that Cuen-Butimea was killed with a single shot (likely at close range, since Kelly's weapon was said to be an AK-47, which is designed for close combat). 

  A few other tidbits emerged: Lendrum doesn't seem to have noticed that Kelly was not only a rancher, but a published author as well. 

  "Kelly has published a novel titled 'Far Beyond the Border Fence;' which, according to its description on Amazon describes how the protagonist and his men have to patrol the ranch daily with AK-47 rifles."

  An excerpt from said story:

  "Stopping construction of the Border Wall was just a ploy taken by Washington politicians trying to buy the votes of Hispanics living legally and illegally in the US."..."George had emptied both clips but he ran towards the cut fence with his Glock drawn and ready to fire. "

So far from being a 'hero' and a 'true patriot' what we obviously have here is yet another sap egged on by Red Pilled rhetoric who lost it one day and gunned down an unarmed Mexican in cold blood. Given that the migrant actually lived just across the border, he was probably not even intending to stay but likely visiting people he knew in America. As for Kelly, he's probably going to hang; and deservedly so.

What about people like Lendrum, Abbott, DeSantis and others encouraging anti-immigrant hysteria and violence? Nothing will happen to them. We've seen it before with these Red Pills: people like Vox Day, Gavin MacInnis, Andrew Anglin, Rollo Tomassi, Mike Cernovich---they go on getting fat donations, doing interviews, and publishing new books while the chumps who act on their advice end up in jail.

This is what is so sickening about all this: it's bad enough that dupes like Kelly are gulled into committing these crimes---but not a word of empathy or even thought passes Lendrum's pen for the victims. And don't imagine that it isn't contagious---just look at the applause Kelly gets from various sources:

It's past time that the Conservatives dealt with this problem. We don't need these people. Thugs, killers, supremacists, grifters: if it takes their kind to win, then we don't deserve to win. In the 1960s, William F. Buckley led a movement to cut these kooks loose, and it created an effective opposition to the radical Left until the turn of the century. Today, it's apparent that the only antidote to Left-Wing extremism is Right-Wing extremism: and that is no improvement.

DISTRACTION AND MORE DISTRACTION

      So, apparently it's happened yet again: the news just came across the wire that the drunken sots at Elmendorf Air Base intercepted a 'UFO' and disposed of it with another half-million dollar missile. Spokesmen at the Pentagon stated that the object "posed a threat" although they also admitted that they have no idea what it was. 

   It's a good thing that Phileas Fogg is retired: he wouldn't stand a chance against our brave xhes in uniform. 

    

     Ah...less uptight, less politically-correct times. If it turns out that the Pentagon just wasted the Goodyear Blimp on it's way to the Super Bowl...well, there will be no shortage of 'experts' with explanations this afternoon---likely before this post is even finished. 

   Meanwhile, in case anyone is interested, here's a sampling of some of the stories driven off the front page while Americans rush to the 420 stores and supermarkets to stock up before---whatever's planned to happen.

   1. The Pfizer Scandal: which would be really intensifying were it not for the fear of Little Green Men made in the Wuhan Lab. Where we left off, a pervert in Pfizer's executive branch admitted to all sorts of unsavory things including bioengineering and suppressing side-effects of the Loyalty Vaxx. This especially blew up in Asia after Thailand's Crown Princess fell into coma after the third booster and hasn't recovered.

   2. Classified Material Turning Up in Strange Places: The Corporate Media really needed a distraction on this one: Head-of-State Biden, his shady son, and treasonous Arch-RINO Mike Pence have been caught with possession of such material since the year began. Nobody seems interested in asking what this material is or how it got there.

  3.  The Nordstream Pipeline Sabotage: Seymour Hirsch, one of the last remaining actual investigative journalists in the United States exposed this week that the Nord Stream Pipeline was destroyed by American operatives. The pipeline's destruction ensured that Europeans will pay extortionate rates for American and Canadian gas; while American and Canadian consumers will pay higher prices because of 'shortages.' 

  4. Missing Kids: This is a story that surfaced yesterday and has been met with silence by the Corporate Media. It seems that since children and teenagers have been returning to the public school gulag system since the Scamdemic lockdowns, an amazing nearly quarter-million of them are unaccounted for. "An analysis by The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project found an estimated 230,000 students in 21 states whose absences could not be accounted for. These students didn’t move out of state, and they didn’t sign up for private school or home-school, according to publicly available data. In short, they’re missing." One would think that this might be a little more important than hunting errant weather balloons; but even the AP article gives the impression that they wouldn't have bothered to report it except that schools' budgets depend on enrollment.

  For those interested, our friends at Vulture of Critique compiled a short-list of other stories that seem to have fallen out of Ameroboobs' miniscule attention spans. But none of these things make for exciting LARPs like shooting down UFOs, so we'll see.

  

AMERICA'S COLLECTIVE MELTDOWN IN THE STRATOSPHERE

    If the first six weeks of 2023 is any bell-weather of how this year is going go, then we Americans are in for a rough time. Just a few weeks ago, I get accused of spreading misinformation about the Loyalty Vaxx for citing the government's own casualty statistics and a Pfizer executive's own confessions. That labelled me a Right-Wing Whacko. Then, the country collectively chimps out over an aerostat that accidently blew over North America: I end up spending now four posts in a row countering misinformation about how physics and balloons actually work. That has labelled me a Left-Wing Whacko. 

   To use a postmodern term, I identify as a Conservative. I'm not actually certain anymore that the term means anything. Increasingly, Conservatism is taking on the aspect of the Alt-Right/Red Pilled Cult---which is nothing 'Conservative' but is really the Reactionary Left. I wish that Republican Leaders would get it through their heads that pouncing on every issue and distraction brought up by the Left and making it worse is not a winning strategy.

   The Weather Balloon Panic of 2023 is a great example. The Right has managed to outdo the Left in anti-China posturing and outright paranoia. This is going to end up backfiring on them. What likely began as the Junta exploiting the incident for a cheap anti-China publicity stunt is going to end with the Controlled Opposition Republicans looking like a collection of complete kooks. Just before the Balloon Hysteria broke, a story from a Beltway think-tank postulated that China is implanting espionage devices in Chinese-manufactured appliances to spy on us in our homes. This is all coming from the same people who defend domestic espionage as necessary for National Security.

     
    Sean Callaghan---a former petty official in the Obama Administration---evidently another Liberal Mugged by Reality, wrote an exceptionally hysterical article on an allegedly Conservative website today. Callaghan has bought into an idea which for some inexplicable reason has gained a lot of traction on the Right: that somehow the Biden/Harris Junta and the Communist Party of China are in collusion. It's about as ridiculous an idea as the Left's Conspiracy Theories about Trump colluding with Russia. One would think that the Junta reintroducing the 'Pivot to Asia', arming Taiwan, and supporting Soros-backed uprisings in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, that the alleged 'partnership' isn't going so well.

   Callaghan, has gone even further than most paranoiacs and suggests that the Junta actually worked with China to stage the whole incident. It's noteworthy in this context that the story about the second Spy Balloon has been dropped like a hot potato from the MSM. That object floated further downstream and is believed to be passing over Colombia, Colombia's a nice place with a lot of decent people, but it doesn't really factor as much of a source of global Intel focus.

   But if anyone seriously thought about the implications of China invading Colombian airspace with a spy balloon, it would make us all stop and think: which neither the DNC, nor the RNC, nor the WEF wants. Panic sells these days, not reason.

  Callaghan begins his article citing historical precedent: "It’s usually called an invasion when a military aircraft breaches national airspace without permission. America was in a world war the last known time foreign military aircraft invaded airspace over America’s homeland. Imperial Japan sent thousands of bombs on balloons over the westerly Pacific winds into the continental United States. One killed six Sunday school picnickers in Oregon."  Yes, and the campaign was such a resounding success for the Japanese Military that China has apparently been plotting the same strategy for the last 80 years. Luckily, the Junta shot it down on a Saturday before it got an American Sunday-School this time. Interestingly, Callaghan discreetly omits mention of more recent attacks committed by US drones violating airspaces and bombing out weddings, schools, funerals, aspirin factories, etc.

   "Yet that was not the last time foreign military aircraft flew over the United States. Before last week’s military balloon from China, it had happened dozens of times before—with America’s permission." Heck, it's not even the first balloon hoax hyped for military purposes. In 1896, a State Senator from Arkansas is said to have spoken with the pilot of a UFO during a wave of airship sightings. According to him, the balloon was armed with a Hotchkiss Machine Gun and bound for Cuba, which was then engaged in a revolt against Spain. (In the late 1890s, anti-Spanish sentiment was about as rife in the Media as anti-China propaganda is today). 

   "Take the Pentagon’s response," Callaghan continues, "there was none...The military refused to say when, exactly, it started tracking the balloon, but admitted that it had a track on it by the time it neared American airspace over the remote Aleutian Islands off the southern tip of Alaska. Yet, the administration kept the balloon secret for days and planned to keep it secret forever." On the contrary: it was the Pentagon that hyped up the 'spy balloon' narrative to begin with. Have Americans become so addled they can't even remember what the 'narrative' was just five days ago?

   More to the point, are pundits like Callaghan arguing that we should take anything coming out of the mouths of Lloyd Austin and Mike Milley seriously? Or his, for that matter, when he makes idiotic statements like: "That slow, simple balloon could have been the perfect way to deliver a nuclear bomb over American soil to detonate in the atmosphere before America knew it was under attack: a floating Trojan Horse that would cause an electromagnetic pulse, destroying the electrical grid and frying electronics across swaths of the American continent!"  A bomb that size would roughly be 12 feet long, about 3 feet wide, and weigh around 750 lbs. (You know, the kind that the Media 'experts' assure us can be carried in a suitcase and hidden inconspicuously)---quite a payload for a zero-pressure high-altitude balloon that can't even be steered reliably! Especially since it would unlikely cause much damage outside of a 2-3 mile radius.

   Nobody seems to want to ask one of the most obvious questions: why would China want to do blow up our power grid in the first place? Wouldn't Chinese assets in America be destroyed too? Not to mention the economic damage from the cutting off of trade relations that China would bring upon itself. These same pundits have been howling and complaining that China is buying US farmland (though substantially less than Oligarchs like Gates, Buffett, Bezos, and Ted Turner). Most of the produce of that farmland is intended to be exported back to China: why would they cause a major breakdown in their own food supply? 

   This whole narrative coming out of so-called Conservatives makes about as much sense as their anti-immigrant posturing or their pouring billions down the drain supporting Ukraine. Callaghan's prose breaks into the typical contextless, nonsensical, bowtie-clutching refrains from a Party now so bankrupt of ideas that all they can do is find boogie-men and scapegoats to chase all over the planet. "So, how would Biden and his administration have reacted if Xi asked to fly spy balloons over America’s military bases? Biden and his drippingly pro-China administration, Milley included, probably would have said “welcome to our open skies!” And, they probably would have thought that they could open the door to China, in secret, without asking Congress! No American should ever have to wonder whose side the president or the Pentagon is on! Congress and the press must get real answers explaining why China’s balloon made it over the American homeland! If Joe Biden committed or abetted a crime or a crime-like act to aid a Chinese military mission, he must be impeached and removed from office!" Blah, blah, blah, blah.

    You'd think that with millions of Americans dying from the side-effects of an unsafe (and often mandated vaccine); a few thousand more dying from Opioid addictions (which often started as prescribed medication); record numbers of psychos involved in mass-shootings (nearly all of whom were on FDA-approved psychological drugs)----Maybe Big Pharma might be a bigger threat? So far, Chinese weather balloons haven't caused any American deaths. 

   Since we're talking about bombed-out cities: anybody seen their own downtowns lately? China didn't do any of that; although American robber-barons outsourcing our economy to places like that did.

   Wars also typically displace families and create orphans. Is China responsible for our staggering number of fatherless homes, double-digit divorce rates, escalating suicide rates among children; crashing fertility rates, rising stillbirths and defective children? Did China make us kill 1 in 5 babies before birth? Were they the ones who dumbed down our schools and put Academia up for sale?

   If China occupied us militarily, they'd put us under Martial Law and take over communications. But were they the ones who concentrated 90% of the Media in the hands of an irresponsible monopoly? Did China shred our Constitution and lock us down for two years? Did they set up domestic espionage here? Did they weaponize our healthcare system?

  And, as mentioned in the previous articles on this subject: China noticeably doesn't have celebrities dancing around in Satan costumes and praised by their media. China doesn't have perverts reading nursery-rhymes to 5-year olds. They don't have criminal gangs taking over whole city blocks, burning down police stations and calling it a Summer of Love. But a weather balloon blows off course and Americans have panic attacks over that. 

   How about if we started hearing the so-called Right start coming up with a few solutions instead of trying to outdo the Left in their extremism? And how about if some of the so-called Christian Conservatives started standing up for human rights instead of looking down their noses at their so-called 'inferiors' for a change? 

  Last but not least: another thing that needs to be done is draining the Beltway Swamp known as the Pentagon. The Chinese have known not only our (obsolete) missile silo positions and layouts at least since the Clinton years. Clinton, Bush, and Obama all allowed corrupt defense contractors to outsource sensitive military equipment to China and other countries. A Chinese spy or two have been caught at such bases. A few years ago, an analyst at Janes Defense Weekly alleged that foreign satellites could scramble our launch codes and detonate our missiles on the ground---Russia's proven that they can control our drones in both Ukraine and Syria. 

  In 2017, during a confrontation with North Korea, the Trump Administration learned that we had no anti-missile defenses anywhere in the Pacific. Chinese submarines routinely infiltrate our fleets without being detected. Once they sailed an entire task force to Alaska---within missile range of Obama, who was giving a speech there---and weren't detected until some Eskimos reported them to the Coast Guard. And who can forget the time that the Iranians captured ten of our brave zhes in uniform---along with two gunships---and filmed them kneeling, crying for mercy, and throwing tantrums in front of their captors?

   The bottom line here is that the Chinese really don't have to do much to destroy us. We're accomplishing that on our own with very little help from them.  

   

  

SATAN, PARANOIA, AND PEKING DUCK

      We just knew it would happen. Americans did take a short respite from anti-China hysterics long enough on Sunday to participate vicariously in the annual Bacchanal known as the Grammy Awards. This ceremony began in 1959 as a way of recognizing Madison Avenue Shylocks best-selling popular records. Lately, it's just become a cesspool of bad taste, political correctness, and a general waste of time. The only interesting thing about it this year was that the Oligarchs had a display which some viewers called 'Satanic'.

    

 

   Where would anybody have gotten that idea? Between TV shows like Lucifer, the creepy Occultism increasingly obvious in children's programming, and degenerate spectacles like recent Superbowl halftime shows, it seems as though the Cultural Elites are not only becoming more brazen about advertising their intentions: they are also less reticent about promoting the source of inspiration for their schemes. 

   And here we are again though on Monday Morning and these are the headlines flooding across the wire:

  "Congressman says Chinese Spy Balloon was a Test of American Weakness."

  "Biden Continues to Embolden Enemies with his Weakness."

  "Senator Cotton Blasts Biden's Response to Chinese Spy Balloon: This is an Embarrassment." 

  "Second Chinese Spy Balloon Confirmed Over Latin America." 

  "Senator Rubio: China Sent Spy Balloon to Send a Message that America is in Decline."

  "House GOP Eyes China Spy Balloon Investigations."

   "Gang of Eight Briefing on Suspected Chinese Spy Balloon Could Occur as Early as Tuesday."

  "Chinese Spy Balloon: Pentagon to Brief Senate on February 15th, Schumer says."

   Whew. That's almost enough Paranoia for a whole week, and it's only Monday. Pfizer probably will regain its lost stock margins on the sale of tranquilizers and happy-pills this week alone. I think that today I might head to Panda Express before the angry mob's mass-hysteria starts targeting Chinese restaurants. One never knows where their outrage will fall next. Smart entrepreneurs might want to change their adverts to Taiwanese Cuisine or something less triggering. 

    

     The last major balloon crisis story to absorb Ameroboob attention at this level turned out to be a complete hoax, and back then there was talk of banning hot-air balloons and other nonsense until the scam was exposed and all of the 'experts' and 'pundits' were eating crow. Postmodern Americans seem to have this tendency to act first and think later, which never bodes well for a democratic society. Often too it comes to a bad end: 9/11 ended with half our Constitution being shredded and a half-dozen or so expensive and ineffective wars that killed millions of innocent people across Africa and the Middle East. The Scamdemic ended with the other half of the Constitution being shredded and thousands dying of side-effects from the Loyalty Vaxx. 

    Yet, it seems as though our 'enlightened' postmodern populace is wholly incapable of learning from their mistakes. Neocon blowhard Mike Pompeo, who was disgraced from foreign policy positions for incompetence by President Trump, gave a fair specimen of the ranting emanating from the US Deep State:

   "America must demand reciprocity. If China doesn’t allow Americans to purchase farmland next to their military installations, we shouldn’t either. {Actually, they do allow joint agricultural projects with the US and other countries} If China doesn’t allow our diplomats to move freely across China, then Chinese diplomats shouldn’t be able to either. { Actually, China does allow diplomatic freedom of travel} If Americans can’t get research jobs at top installations in Beijing, then Chinese researchers shouldn’t be able to get jobs here either."{There are hundreds of American researchers at Chinese Universities}. "The CCP’s spy balloon is a symptom of the Biden administration’s weakness, not only in relation to the People’s Republic of China, but to America’s adversaries writ large...blah, blah, blah..." 

   What's really behind much of this anti-China paranoia is that China doesn't allow supranational Western banksters and robber barons to dominate their economy; they don't allow Western gangsters to flood their society with drugs and pornography; and they don't allow our filthy Media free rein to pollute the minds of their young people with things like idiots dancing around in Satan costumes handing out awards to perverts and industry shills. 

  Americans, of course, don't want to face that fact. In every major city, they ignore the broken sidewalks and streets, the blocks of tent-city bum jungles, the hypos and human waste in every public space, the obese crack-addicts soliciting sex, the Pride Parades shoved in their children's faces, the daily robberies and murders: we look the other way with resentment because China wants no part of our 'exceptionalism.' 

   What America needs to do if it really wants to stay competitive with China is start doing things to be great again instead of focusing on appearing great; because we aren't fooling anybody other than ourselves. 

   

AMERICA SAVED FROM WEATHER BALLOON THREAT

   After a brief but fairly intensive LARP and subsequent national panic attack, our nominal Head-of-State got tired of being called a weenie by the Alphas in the Controlled Opposition and ordered the Chinese meteorological craft 'spy balloon' to be shot down. Our military was surprisingly successful---no doubt due to their long experience in attacking unarmed positions. Without a doubt, the brave pilot of this venture was someone who represents diversity and will probably receive a promotion and a Congressional Medal of Honor for the heroic deed. Americans can now rest easy until the next National Emergency and it's rumored that local hookah lounges and sports bars will be carrying live 24/7 coverage of the story on Big Screen (masks and vaxx passports required). 

   Fortunately, upon waking up this morning, the supermarket shelves hadn't been stripped of toilet paper, bottled water, or Russian vodka like our last two national panic attacks. Evidently, the either the people in the cities can't afford gas to get here, or the effects of the anti-anxiety meds from last night hadn't worn off yet. Thus, thankfully we've been spared one more international embarrassment; but at least the Pfizer Scandal is off the front page. 

   On social media and most news pages last night, Americans were seeing Spy Balloons and little green men with Made in China labels on their spacesuits everywhere. No doubt this will continue for the next few days, as the story garnered huge media ratings and made massive political capital for both parties. I don't want to waste too much time going over the hallucinations and paranoia being discussed in these venues. We'll probably be treated to Congressional Hearings and proposed bans on balloons before it's all over. But one commenter on a foreign news site I think brought up a point worth discussing:

    Guys like this should be thankful they don't have to live here and deal with it. I've noticed it for a long time. It's hilarious, though somewhat sad, to see continual polls to the effect that Americans don't trust the government; don't trust the media; think that Wall Street is giving them the shaft---without seeing the irony that the very same cabal practically programs their own minds. The average Ameroboob wouldn't believe that it was raining outside unless he got a verified source from the National Weather Service to tell him so. 

    Decades of intergenerational drug abuse, dumbed-down schools, and servile media have crippled most Americans' capacity for critical thought. Mentioning China in any news story today is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. As if that's not already bad enough, the Oligarchs are already moving to implement the 2023 WEF Agenda and crack down even harder on anybody dissenting from the Official Narrative. I'd think that Americans would be a little more concerned about losing the 1st Amendment than the Chinese finding out that there's traffic congestion in Kansas City. My intuition, however, tells me that they aren't.

   It's gotten to the point now where those of us who don't buy into the Narrative really need to be concerned; because what this latest incident showed us is that not only are we sinking into cultural Barbarism, we're becoming a Barbarian Culture which also has access to advanced technology---including atomic weapons. When I've visited countries in Latin America, a saying I frequently heard about Foreign Policy was: "When you have a man like Castro running Cuba, the whole region has a problem. You put a man like that in charge of the United States and the whole world is going to have a problem." 

   Reflect on how close we are to that. When you read the idiotic reactions to a stray balloon in news comments; combined with a financial despotism of 'woke' fanatics and a dumbed-down, doped-up, and egocentric population demanding Alpha strongmen and pseudo-scientists to lead them---then simple logic ought to tell us that it's only a matter of time before the Doomsday Clock strikes Midnight. As for Chinese spying, don't imagine that they don't read our news media, or listen to American opinions, or hear the plans of politicians and Oligarchs and aren't preparing to defend themselves. Our pundits can sneer all they want to, and carry on like a (now practically inevitable) Sino-American War is going to be like a college homecoming game with a big frat party afterwards. Personally I don't think that underestimating China and mistaking their patience for weakness is a good idea. 

     

    

   

BALLOON HEADS

    In case nobody has already heard the news, or doesn't live in the Pacific Northwest, one---possibly two---large balloons of currently unknown origin have appeared in the skies setting off panic-attacks in various quarters. The commanders of our brave xhes in uniform have made the excitement worse by claiming---without a lot of evidence---that these are Chinese Spy Balloons which pose no real threat. Considering that the personnel in our Pacific Observation units recently had to be given incentives to stop failing drug tests and getting drunk on duty, there's reason to be skeptical of the Pentagon's assessments. 

   There are other reasons too. One is that modern armies haven't had a Balloon Corps since around the mid-1930s. IIRC. the Italians were the last ones to use them with any effect during the Abyssinian War of 1935. The Japanese tried during WW2 to send unmanned balloons with incendiaries to our West Coast to start forest fires, but it didn't work out very well. In WW1, the military learned that they were fairly easy to shoot down with even the quality of aircraft we had back then. The problem that spy balloons always had is exactly what we're seeing now: the targets of the operation can see them too, which rather defeats the purpose of spying in the first place. 

     The Chinese are denying sending such an object over here for espionage purposes. Huang Zhicheng, an aerodynamics expert in the Chinese Government, laconically said in an interview that "According to the information released by the US, the balloon is of 40 cubic meters and can 'fly from China to the US'. If the US has concrete evidence to prove this balloon belongs to China, it shows China has exceeded the US in technologies in the domain.” 

    Balloons generally are of two types: one is the low-pressure type of which we are all familiar. As we've all seen, such balloons are carried by the wind and aren't steerable. The one(s) sighted over the Pacific Northwest are of this type. The other type uses pressurized gas which is controlled by an engine---the Goodyear Blimp is an example of such an airship and some zeppelins built by the Germans in the 1930s had nearly unlimited range. In other words, flying a balloon from China to the United States over a directed target is nearly an impossible feat. Given that China has some very advanced satellites which can view our military installations from space, it makes the story even more ridiculous. In all probability, this is a harmless weather balloon blown off course. 

    However, here in the Prozac Nation, the story is dominating Friday morning's news just in time to divert public attention from the Pfizer Scandal as well as diverting Ameroboob outrage from skyrocketing utility bills which always arrive around the 1st of the month. The Domino Effect is in full swing: panic on social media, followed by media hype for ratings, followed by political finger-pointing. We're talking here about a population who seriously believes that a warmer-than-average Winter is being caused by gas stoves; and that men can become women just by putting on a wig and changing their clothes. Understanding something as complicated as a weather balloon is a real challenge for most of them. 

   Practically every headline is referring to the object as a Chinese Spy Balloon. Arch-RINO Kevin McCarthy has called on President Joe Biden to convene a meeting of the “Gang of Eight”—intelligence committee members and leadership from both parties—to deal with this threat to national security. Other members of Congress are stating words to the effect that if we only had more 'Alphas' in charge, we'd have shot the thing down by now. There are even demands to cancel Anthony Blinken's proposed diplomatic trip to China over the 'incident.'

   For whatever their words are worth, the Pentagon estimates that the object spotted over Montana is floating at an altitude of 66,000 feet, which is about twice as high as commercial jetliners go. Weather balloons are designed to rise to an altitude of 100,000 feet, where the atmospheric pressure causes them to pop. The equipment on board drops by parachute, (which these days are GPS tracked) and the information recovered. What obviously happened here is that someone in China or elsewhere under-inflated one which didn't make altitude and blew off course. It's likely not even sending information because the equipment is operated with a barometric pressure switch which has to go much higher before it turns on.

   Americans need to pull their own heads out of the clouds because right now, that's where the real problem lies.