RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-spy-balloon-biden-administration-trump-administration-pentagon-glen-vanherck-11675724569?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The U.S. Navy is fishing fragments of a Chinese spy balloon out of the Atlantic Ocean, and each fresh detail about this episode raises new and troubling questions. A striking example is the news from the Biden Administration that previous Chinese balloon incursions into the U.S. appear to have gone undetected. This suggests there’s a major hole in U.S. defenses that needs closing.

A senior defense official told reporters on Feb. 2 that a balloon incursion “has happened a handful of other times over the past few years, to include before this Administration. It is appearing to hang out for a long period of time this time around, more persistent than in previous instances.”

The Biden Team was leaking over the weekend that balloons had snuck into U.S. airspace during the Trump Administration, and the obvious implication was to absolve President Biden of political blame. More than one media outfit took the bait. But then Trump officials started denying on the record that they’d ever heard of such an event—from former national security adviser John Bolton to Defense Secretary Mark Esper to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The Administration’s attempt to muddy responsibility is bad enough, but the revelation that at least three past balloon flights evaded U.S. notice is alarming. “I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck of U.S. Northern Command told reporters on Monday. In Pentagon argot for the ages, he called it “a domain awareness gap.” The U.S. government ostensibly pieced the puzzle together later with the help of the intelligence community.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-balloon-surveillance-montana-beijing-biden-administration-xi-jinping-antony-blinken-11675461302?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday postponed his visit to Beijing scheduled for next week after a suspicious Chinese balloon was spotted over Montana. Good decision. But the public deserves to know more about this episode, and one uncomfortable lesson is that the U.S. homeland is increasingly vulnerable.

The Pentagon said Thursday night it had “detected and is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon” over the U.S. F-22 fighter jets and other assets were sent to examine the balloon, and one question is why the U.S. didn’t shoot it out of the sky. The Pentagon admits it’s been lurking in sovereign U.S. air space for “a couple of days,” notably near bases for U.S. nuclear missiles.

The military brass advised against shooting down the balloon, though the stated reason—risk of debris—seems manageable. No one doubts China would have shot down an American asset wandering over its bases. The Pentagon won’t say whether it may take out the balloon once it’s over water.

Beijing’s official explanation is that this is merely a hapless “civilian airship” that made a wrong turn and . . . ended up near U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile bases. “China regrets that the airship strayed into the United States,” the foreign ministry said.

So the balloon heads over the Aleutians, strays over Canada, but China acknowledges the balloon only after the U.S. announces it has been discovered over Montana? This isn’t believable, and the patent dishonesty will add to the U.S. public’s growing mistrust of China.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2023/02/02/breaking-pentagon-admits-theres-a-chinese-spy-balloon-hovering-over-the-united-states-n1667467

The Pentagon admitted on Thursday that the U.S. military has been monitoring what’s being described as a Chinese “surveillance balloon” hovering in the skies over the United States for days.

“The United States government has detected and is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now,” Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told NBC News. “We continue to track and monitor it closely.” Officials have confirmed that the balloon belongs to China.

“Once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information,” Ryder said.

“The official said there was a window while the balloon was over Montana Wednesday when they could have taken it down. NORAD sent aircraft — including F-22 Raptors from Nellis Air Force Base and airborne early warning aircraft known as AWACs — but the official would not say whether one of the options was to shoot the balloon out of the sky with a U.S. aircraft,” NBC reported. “The U.S. military flights prompted a ground stop at the airport in Billings, with air traffic controllers citing a ‘special military mission.’”

According to the Montana Free Press, “The Air Force at Malmstrom [Air Force Base] maintains 150 intercontinental ballistic missile silos across its 13,800-square-mile complex in central Montana.”

Biden refused to answer questions shouted at him by reporters Thursday afternoon.

Officials say the balloon flew over the Aleutian Islands and through Canada before settling over the Billings, Mont., area. The balloon is still hovering somewhere over the United States, according to a senior defense official who declined to say where it is now.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-admin-allows-chine-to-fly-spy-balloon-over-montana/

China knows what it’s doing. It pushes harder and harder because it knows that western nations are weak and will back down.

And we never disappoint.

The U.S. tracked what officials described as a Chinese reconnaissance balloon over the continental states this week, in what would be an aggressive act of intelligence gathering over sensitive American national security sites.

The balloon sighting came days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken was to make a planned trip to Beijing, according to U.S. officials, throwing into question efforts to repair relations between the two powers who are at odds over a host of global and regional issues.

There’s nothing accidental about the timing.

Two Air Force F-22 fighters scrambled from Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to Montana, where the balloon was observed, before the administration decided not to shoot it down.

Shooting it down would be aggressive. It would mean committing and taking a stand. So that’s a no-go.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/01/31/biden-dhs-released-564-criminal-illegals-into-u-s-in-january-2023-n1666724

While falsely boasting that the number of illegal alien crossings dropped significantly in January, the Biden administration was distracting from another aspect of the southern border crisis — the fact that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released 564 criminal illegals from detention and into America just in the first 30 days of 2023. Because the Biden administration doesn’t care a bit about Americans’ safety.

Breitbart explained the new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data that highlights the ugly realities of the Biden border crisis. Between Jan. 1 and Jan. 30, 2023, the DHS released 564 illegal aliens “with criminal convictions and those with pending criminal charges against them” into the U.S. interior. From December 2022 through January 30, 2023, nearly 1,000 illegal alien convicts were released into America, as well as over 1,200 illegals with pending criminal charges, making about 2,200 convicted or charged criminals. Remember that the next time Democrats claim they want gun confiscation — I mean, gun control — because they care about keeping the American people safe.

Most illegal alien criminals released this January were through an “order of recognizance,” Breitbart reports. The DHS released 5,590 illegals altogether into the United States in the first 30 days of 2023, most of them likely to return to the same American communities where they were first arrested by ICE agents. Which makes the arrests seem pretty pointless.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/18/watchdog-pentagon-cant-account-for-220-billion-in-equipment/

On Tuesday, a watchdog report claimed that the Department of Defense (DOD) has still been unable to account for at least $220 billion worth of equipment that had been given to government contractors.

According to the Daily Caller, the report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted that auditors first noticed the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of such contractor-loaned equipment back in 2001. The report says that the DOD has not made any improvements to its accountability processes since then, which heightens the possibility of overlooking similar errors in the future.

“This long-standing issue affects the accounting and reporting of GFP and is one of the reasons DOD is unable to produce auditable financial statements,” the GAO report read in part.

The GAO went on to say that when it comes to attempting to identify the causes of such financial deficiencies, the DOD should create an entirely separate plan to address this issue, since “department-wide efforts have not been comprehensive and sufficiently detailed.”

“Without such a strategy, DOD is at an increased risk that its efforts to remediate the [government furnished property] material weakness will continue to be insufficient and that it will continue to miss or push back target remediation dates,” the report continued.

Even more alarming is the likelihood that the given total of $220 billion in unaccounted property may be lower than the actual amount. The GAO noted in its report that there had been past instances of the military admitting that it could not provide an estimate; in 2016, the Army told the GAO that it had an “unknown” number of assets, and that “quantities may be greatly different than the Army’s documented property records reflect.”

Since the DOD had its first audit in 2018, it failed its fifth consecutive audit in November of last year. Of the Pentagon’s roughly $3.5 trillion in assets, contractors were unable to provide expenditures for about 61 percent of the money spent.

“I would not say that we flunked,” said Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord in response to the abysmal report. “The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/chinese_communist_party_aggression_against_america.html

Joe Biden’s decision to allow a Chinese company “to own 370 acres of land within 12 miles of Grand Forks Air Force Base in Grand Forks, North Dakota” portends dire consequences for America.

According to Gordon Chang,

China will be able to use a proposed $700 million corn milling plant on the site to spy on military communications and even disrupt them. In Beijing, they must be shaking their heads in disbelief at the inability of the U.S. to protect some of its most sensitive communications.

Consequently,

Fufeng USA, a subsidiary of a Shandong province-based agribusiness giant, is, at least for the moment, free to build its wet corn milling and biofermentation plant in Grand Forks.

Moreover, “[t]he Chinese will now have the ability to conduct passive, persistent surveillance of both signals controlling experimental drones that are routinely tested at that USAF facility as well as signals that are routinely beamed to and from sensitive U.S. military satellites[.]”

If that were not alarming enough, consider the fact that “[s]hould the U.S. and China end up in a shooting war over, say, Taiwan, Fufeng’s property near the Air Force base could be used to send malicious signals to jam passing satellites or disrupt the operation of drones.  We have made ourselves vulnerable on our own territory.”

So while the American military establishment worries about which pronouns to use, our enemies cannot believe their good fortune.  The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has already doubled its nuclear stockpile in just two years.  Moreover, in its arsenal of weaponry, China has declared “a people’s war” on the United States by using investments to undermine American strength.

According to Texas Scorecard, the CCP is doggedly pursuing the American agriculture infrastructure. 

Agricultural land, and the oftentimes attached food processing, serves a vital function in the insulation of any nation from foreign powers.

Now, with an ongoing military conflict in eastern Europe, the need to be agriculturally independent is gaining deserved attention.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/man-who-stabbed-two-cops-in-times-square-left-chilling-manifesto/

19-year-old Trevor Bickford stabbed two cops with a machete in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and authorities are scratching their heads and wondering why. According to the UK’s Daily Mail, “an investigation was underway to pinpoint a motive for the attack.” That investigation, however, may be more the result of officials not wanting to recognize Bickford’s obvious motive, rather than a matter of his real intentions being unclear. Bickford himself left behind a “manifesto” in which he made his perspective and intentions quite clear. But since neither he nor his attack fit the establishment media/Biden regime narrative about the “white supremacist” terror threat, they’re unlikely to get much attention.

The New York Post reported Sunday that when he was arrested after the stabbings, Bickford had a handwritten note in his backpack, asking his family to “please repent to Allah and accept Islam.” The backpack also contained a “collection of religious material” that was unlikely to have been gospel tracts. Bickford wrote: “To my family — specifically, mother —  I’m sorry for not having been a good enough son.” But then he gets down to brass tacks: “I fear greatly that you will not repent to Allah. And therefore I hold hope in my heart that a piece of you believes so that you may be taken out to [sic] the hellfire.”

Bickford addressed the same hope to his brother: “To Travis. Of anyone I’ve known who I have felt is closest to faith — it’s you. Of anyone I’ve ever wanted to accept Islam with me — it’s you. Please repent to Allah and accept Islam. I fear for you.” To his other brother, who is reportedly in the U.S. Marine Corps, Bickford wrote: “To Devon, there was a time when we were close, but that time has passed. You have joined the ranks of my enemy. And for that I can give you no kind words – return to Allah.”

The New York Post also noted that Bickford wanted to attack “a uniformed officer” or “someone with a gun,” as he believed such people to be an “enemy of the state.” Which state? The New York Post, as willfully ignorant as the rest of the establishment media, shows no curiosity about this question. But clearly, Trevor Bickford, after he converted to Islam, was no stalwart American patriot. He wanted to target a uniformed officer as an enemy of the Islamic state. He had no kind words for his brother Devon because Devon had joined “the ranks of my enemy,” that is, the U.S. military.

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Daniel+Greenfield+Article%3A+Three+Muslim+Knife+Attacks+on+NYPD+Officers+in+8+Years&

At 9:30 PM, partygoers in Times Square wearing purple Planet Fitness hats heard a bang.

The ball hadn’t dropped, another Jihadi had. Along with three cops.

Trevor Bickford, 19, had taken the train down from Wells, Maine: a town of less than 10,000 souls. The born-again Jihadi had turned to Islam after his father’s drug overdose. He urged his mother and brothers to join him in serving Allah or they would perish in “hellfire”.

Maine isn’t a big hub of Islamic terrorism so the local teens who convert to Islam have to go to more exciting places to kill infidels in the name of Allah and earn their fellow 72 virgins.

In November, Xavier Pelkey, 19, of Waterville, Maine, a city of 15,000, was indicted for joining ISIS and plotting to kill some Shiites at a mosque in Chicago.

Pelkey and three other Jihadists intended to “enter the Shia mosque and separate the adults from the children, then murder the adults”. Then they planned to move on to a synagogue.

The plot to massacre Muslims in a mosque (never mind Jews) received virtually no coverage in the media because while Xavier is white, he’s a Muslim who had changed his name to Abdullah or ‘Servant of Allah’. Xavier’s two other pals, an unnamed 15-year-old in Chicago and a 17-year-old in Kentucky, had assembled hand painted ISIS flags and homemade bombs.

Xavier told them he wanted to be a martyr “and die while fighting in the cause of Allah”.

Trevor might have been jealous that Xavier/Abdullah beat him out by a month as the first ISIS terrorist out of Maine and took the train to New York City for what must have seemed like the biggest and juiciest target: the massive crowds gathered in Times Square to cheer the ball drop.

Muslim terrorists had previously hit public celebrations. And while Trevor was only armed with a machete, in a crowd that big, he probably figured that he couldn’t fail to kill someone.