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https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/05/patrick-lawrence-the-pentagons-balloon-floats-on/

The Pentagon’s Balloon Floats On  

It is just as well that Antony “Guardrails” Blinken has called off his long-scheduled visit to Beijing, which was due to begin Tuesday. It would have been his first since taking over at State and the first by a secretary of state in four years. But Blinken would not have got any guardrails in place or built any exit ramps, which he seems to consider his highest calling. Let us wonder, parenthetically, if our Tony wasn’t meant to be a transportation engineer.

No, given the events of the past few weeks, the time for guardrails, exit ramps, and even “easing tensions”–was psychotherapy Blinken’s missed vocation?–would appear to be past for the Biden regime and its relations with Beijing. In my read, Blinken just spared himself another in a considerable line of embarrassments since he made a dog’s dinner of his first encounter with his Chinese counterparts during that infamous debacle in an Anchorage hotel two years ago next month. 

The stated reason for Blinken’s cancellation—and as he has not proposed a future date, it is a cancellation, not the advertised “postponement”—was the Chinese balloon that floated across Montana’s skies last week. I will have a few remarks about this very odd incident, a hall of mirrors in its own right, in due course. For now just two points to note immediately.

One, the appearance of the Chinese balloon in American airspace was a godsend for Blinken. Setting aside his exceptional mediocrity, no American diplomat can hope to get anything done with China while representing an imperium that grows ever more belligerent in the Pacific theater. Easing tensions, guardrails, and all the rest are notions intended to secure the quiescence of the American public—to keep the imperium hidden from view. The Chinese do not take such talk the slightest seriously. They keep the door open to serious negotiation with the U.S. as a matter of principle, but they entertain no illusions whatsoever that a high American official of so provocative an administration as Biden’s will walk through it. 

Two, let us note it was the Pentagon that announced the balloon incident and managed the day-to-day presentation to the public. State and the White House were left to react to the news, at least publicly. Behind this small detail lies a large, decisive victory for the generals—and a defeat for the diplomats, though they have not for decades fought their corner in these matters with any discernible vigor or conviction.

Remember all the grand talk of “diplomacy first,” and “the military will be our last resort” during Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020 and his early months in office? That was just more of this jumped-up provincial pol’s patented snake oil, as the wiser among us understood from the first. This guy was never serious about a shift to responsible statecraft. He has a general solidly in with the arms merchants running the Defense Department and the most pitiable nerd since John Kerry—and this goes back, wow, three secretaries—running State.  

If the balloon incident merits consideration on its own, what happened 60,000 feet above Montana last week cannot be understood without careful reference to other, more consequential developments over the course of the past few weeks—or, depending on how you count, years. 

A few weeks ago Biden welcomed Fumio Kishida to the White House. There in the Oval Office he enlisted the willing Japanese premier in Washington’s increasingly aggressive campaign to threaten China and, finally, draw it into a military confrontation. When Kishida departed for Tokyo, Japan was certified as what Yasuhiro Nakasone, the nationalist premier during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, long wanted to make it: As Nakasone said, “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” stationed in the western Pacific.

I counted the Kishida–Biden summit big news. News as big or bigger came last week, just before the balloon business, when Defense Secretary Llyod Austin met in Manila with Ferdinand Marcos—yes, scion of the dictator—and the Filipino president opened the islands to nine, count them, locations where U.S. troops, ships, and aircraft will be permitted to rotate in and out. The rotation arrangement is a way around the post–Marcos constitution, which bars all foreign troops from being stationed on Filipino soil. So they are not stationed there: They come and go and may as well be. 

“This is a big deal,” Austin said while in Manila. “This is a very big deal.” I am with the secretary on this point. Look at a map. The Philippines’ northernmost islands are but 90–odd miles from Taiwan. Rotating, schmotating, American troops and matériel of all sorts will now be positioned to deploy effectively and rapidly in a ground, air, and sea operation against China in direct defense of the island territory—which has become, since Mike Pompeo’s day as Blinken’s predecessor, the epicenter of a majorly reinvigorated U.S. military presence at the far end of the Pacific. What Austin got done in Manila last week has been in the works at least since early 2019, when the Pentagon sold Capitol Hill on what it called its “Regain the Advantage” plan — as if the U.S. had ever lost it. Congress renamed the operation the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” and promptly threw scores of billions of dollars at it. These billions continue to flow.  

Look at the map again. Between the Kishida agreement and the Marcos agreement, Washington has secured the military cooperation of two of America’s alliance partners in the Pacific to make a north-south arc far closer to China’s shoreline than Hawaii is to California. A third treaty ally, Australia, has for years cultivated a confrontational stance toward China and welcomed an increased U.S. military presence–a tilt diametrically opposed to the interests of Australian citizens and businesses, if not the nation’s defense cliques. 

John Lander, a veteran Australian diplomat, gave an encyclopedic account of this increasingly militarized relationship in a lecture to the Committee for the Republic a couple of weeks ago. I urge readers to view it here. When it appeared on our computer screen, we were riveted. The household came to a stop until Lander had finished.

Amid these “facts on the ground,” the voices of hawks in Washington grow shriller and more worrisome. 

In a memo dated February 1 but leaked several days earlier, a four-star Air Force general instructed units under his command to begin concrete preparations for war with China he predicted will come by 2025. Gen. Mike Minihan heads the U.S. Air Mobility Command—he is in essence a logistics man—and to go by his photograph and what he has to say for himself he is straight out of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Minihan’s memo—leaked, but I am not sure how confidential it was actually meant to be—laid out a nine-point plan as “preparation for the next fight.” “I hope I am wrong,” he commented after the memo was made public. “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025. Xi’s team, reason, and opportunity are all aligned for 2025.”

O.K., the American military is replete with kooks such as Milihan whose off-the-wall utterances are never heard beyond the barracks. We’re seeing something different now. Michael McCaul, the new chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee responded to the Milihan memo this way on Fox News Sunday after it was made public: “I hope he’s wrong as well. I think he’s right, though, unfortunately.”

Think about this, the view of the most powerful figure in the House on the foreign policy side. Now think about Blinken’s just-canceled visit and what the Chinese thought about it. 

The line in Washington before the balloon incident disrupted Blinken’s plans was that his trip to Beijing was especially well timed. Guardrails had to be put in place, tensions had to be eased. What tales the policy cliques tell themselves. A report published Saturday in The Diplomat tells us Beijing saw little point in Blinken’s encounter with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi.  “Sections of China’s officialdom and academia are adamant that the U.S. secretary of state should not be welcome in Beijing,” the magazine reported. And that is just the subhead atop the piece. The whole is worth reading for its careful reporting. 

In effect and according to what official statements have been made, Blinken intended to try once again what has failed since the Anchorage disaster in March 2021: He proposes to persuade Beijing to accept that the U.S. wants to cooperate in some areas—climate, health, and so on, the easy stuff—compete on the economic side, and confront in matters of security. This is naïve in the extreme, the thinking of people who have spent too much time in Washington offices and not enough among other people and in other nations. 

The Chinese read newspapers and can read maps. Shall we leave it at that, and conclude Blinken is fortunate to be off the hook with the Chinese for a good long while? 

I made some initial comments on the balloon incident as the news broke Friday morning, taking care not to draw conclusions. They are here for those interested. 

Here I shall take some care to draw a few conclusions.  

By all available indications, no, the Chinese did not send a high-altitude balloon the size, I read, of several school buses, to gather intelligence on fields of intercontinental missile silos spread across Montana while remaining undetected. Not a persuasive proposition. 

The Pentagon asserted without equivocation that the balloon was “certainly from the People’s Republic of China.” It did not identify the balloon as a surveillance craft in any way Pentagon officials, or any others in Washington, had their names on such a statement. It “assessed” that the balloon was on an espionage mission. Always be wary of this word “assess.” It is a weasel word that does not commit anyone using it to anything. It means, at best, “We don’t know and cannot say.” Or it means, “We know this is not true and will not stand by it but want the public to think it is true.”

No thanks. This is precisely the trick played when “the intelligence community”—that preposterous phrase—put out its “assessment,” in January 2017, of Russian culpability in the theft of Democratic Party email six months earlier. That “assessment” turned out to be nonsense, of course. But no spook had to answer for all the fallacies. 

Why is the Biden regime not making serious, vigorous representations in Beijing—threatening a break in relations, diplomatic expulsions, or other such retaliation for a breach of American sovereignty? Why did the Air Force follow the progress of the balloon all the way across the United States, presumably as it gathered intel all the while, as if it were some kind of harmless curiosity? On Saturday the U.S. shot the balloon down as it drifted across the Atlantic, so there will be no balloon to examine. Interesting. We never saw evidence of Russia’s hand in the pilfered email, either. 

All the evidence to date, which is not to say there is very much, indicates the craft was an off-course weather balloon on a civilian mission, just as the Chinese Foreign Ministry said it was after an apparently careful investigation of the matter Friday. Assume this is so and the above queries have answers. 

The media’s reporting of this incident is down there with the worst of the rubbish they served up during the Russiagate years. In the same stories, numerous of them, The New York Times reported the Pentagon’s “assessment,” then the Chinese explanation, and then went on to refer to the balloon as a spying craft in all subsequent mentions. It continues to do so as we speak. 

The government-supervised Times outdid its own silliness on Saturday morning, by which time it was obvious the status of the balloon as an espionage craft was open to serious doubt. China claims the balloon was used for meteorological purposes, The Times reported. However, the Pentagon says it was a collection device, although it was not sophisticated enough to gather intelligence on the ground below. 

This is a close paraphrase, as Times editors have since deleted this passage from the paper’s website, and I do not blame them. Consider carefully what is being said. 

One, weather balloons are collection devices. Collecting data is what they do. The contradiction The Times pretends to present is sheer chicanery. Two, it was a surveillance balloon but was not capable of surveilling.  

I know The Times well, from the inside as well as out. This is how its editors and reporters slide out the side door when they are at risk of exposure for having misled readers. They sometimes present us with riddles. In this case: It was not a weather balloon because it was a collection device, and let us ignore the fact that weather balloons are by definition collection devices. It was an espionage craft even though it was incapable of espionage.

Answer to the riddle: It was a weather balloon.

The tomfoolery surrounding the balloon incident will soon be forgotten. But do not miss, readers: We have just witnessed an unusually messy and visible round in the decades-long contention between Pentagon generals, whose power waxes without interruption, and a purposefully weakened State Department, whose power has steadily waned with the rise of the national security state.

In this connection, were Blinken in the slightest serious about his easing tensions project, he would have ordered a plane from Andrews Air Force Base and flown to Beijing as soon as he had word of the balloon incident. I see two reasons he didn’t. One, his scheduled talks with Wang Yi, as I have suggested, were a fool’s errand from the first. Two, the Biden regime quickly understood the Pentagon had trumped State once again and, as a matter of political expedience, they had to cave to the Capitol Hill hawks. 

The contention I describe has long been especially intense in trans–Pacific affairs. During my years as a correspondent in Tokyo and elsewhere in East Asia, I drew the conclusion that Washington does not have a foreign policy in the Pacific: It has a security policy run by the military. No honest American diplomat ever contradicted me.

A balloon of little consequence just popped over the Atlantic. The Pentagon’s floats on.  

....

https://brownstone.org/articles/covid-and-the-three-tests-of-compliance/

Covid and the Three Tests of Compliance 

Jesus in the wilderness faced three temptations from the Devil himself: material comfort, fame, and power. Needless to say, he declined every temptation and passed all three trials. 

So too did the couple seeking to enter the order of virtue in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. They blasted right through the tests of silence, isolation, and fear. In the opera, much celebration ensues. 

Fairy tales too are often framed by three chances. The Miller’s daughter is given three chances to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name, for example, and I’m sure you can think of other instances. 

The final movement of the 6th “Tragic” Symphony by Gustav Mahler features three hammer blows, the third of which was later removed by the composer for superstitious reasons: the fear that the third signifies death. To this day, audiences wait in anticipation to see if the conductor will motion the percussionist to deploy the third or not. When he does not, the blow is even more conspicuous in its absence. 

And here we are in year three of the times after the pandemic response sent our lives and those of billions into extraordinary upheaval. To most of us, it seems like a crazy blur of edicts, propaganda, revelations, fear, confusion, division, and shock, so much so that it is hard to keep the history straight. Indeed, many people just want everything forgotten or at least completely mis-remembered. 

Daily, we are bombarded by fake history that we know is wrong. We lived through it. Brownstone has been accumulating all the receipts: the emails, speeches, edits, threats, impositions, demands, and so on. In the face of all this attempted revisionism, it’s hard to keep one’s bearing. 

One way to think about these last three years is a succession of compliance tests: how much liberty and good sense are we willing to surrender to the regime and on what terms? The policies seem to be constructed for just that purpose. 

As if to fit the model, they came in three great waves: lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates. Let’s examine all three stages and reflect on their demands and terms. It begins to make sense, at least from the point of view of those in control. 

Lockdowns 

“Thank goodness for the lockdowns; this will end the pandemic.”

The lockdowns hit us hard from mid-March 2020 and onward, imposed as if they were a conventional response to a circulating new pathogen, though they literally had no precedent in history. They were sweeping, closing churches, schools, small and medium-sized businesses, civic clubs like AA, bars and restaurants plus gyms, and even venues that host weddings and funerals. Many states imposed stay-at-home orders. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, while medical services were reserved for only Covid cases and other extreme emergencies while everything else was shut. 

All of this was based on the astonishing announcement by the Trump administration: “Governors should close schools in communities that are near areas of community transmission” and “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

At the March 16, 2020, press conference, not one reporter asked a critical question. Even if this was only for two weeks, as was promised, how is any of this compatible with law and the Bill of Rights? How is it that bureaucracies, without any vote of any legislature, can simply “shut down” an entire country? It was completely bizarre, so much so that most people figured that there had to be some legitimate underlying rationale. 

Not everyone went along. Some hair salons, bars, and churches remained open but found themselves pilloried by the media. Then the cops arrived, even SWAT teams, closing them by force. The kids had to stay home too, and moms and dads were forced to leave the workforce to care for them at home, splitting their days pretending to work on Zoom calls while their children pretended to be in school on Zoom too. It was a massive crush of technology and everyone had to adapt. 

There was nowhere to go and most American towns suddenly looked like ghost towns. President Trump announced that it would surely all be over by Easter but this itself was something of a shock: Easter was more than two weeks away, so his announcement amounted to extension of lockdowns. His advisers Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx seized the moment and successfully talked Trump into another full 30 days of lockdowns. 

These weeks were excruciating. Many if not most people knew that there was something very wrong but it was unclear what. We could no longer meet with friends and neighbors to discuss. Plus many people in our online communities seemed to be all in on the lockdowns, fully believing that this was the way to control and eventually stop a pandemic. 

And yet there we were, all of us living in this surreal scene, asked to believe the implausible and give up what we loved the most by deference to a handful of people who said that they knew more than we knew. Those who did not do the right thing were considered horrid and unscientific, insufficiently credulous toward our betters. 

Masks 

“Thank goodness for masks; this will end the lockdowns.”

In these early days, there was no thought put into universal masking. It was never part of our history. There was a moment during the 1918 pandemic that one city tried masks but not only did it not work; it produced a massive political revolt. Not since then had masks for the general population ever been tried. Plenty of countries in the Far East had used masks to filter out smog on bad days but that problem had never been something that affected the US enough to make them a norm. 

Plus, in those days, the experts told everyone not to bother with them. The masks should be saved for medical personnel. In any case, they don’t really work to control the spread of viruses like this. They are not the equivalent of using condoms to avoid infection from AIDS. A respiratory virus is something else entirely, and we are a people informed by evidence and science. The evidence was nowhere in sight that masks achieve any real purpose. 

Practically overnight, that advice changed. Part of the deal was that masks were the key to getting out of lockdown. We could leave our home again if only we would wear a mask. For those who don’t like lockdown, now is your chance to leave it behind. You only needed to comply with this second round of edicts. The first round, true, was pretty rough, but who can object to putting a cloth on your face? Surely no one. As Bill Gates said, we wear pants so why not cover our faces too? It only makes sense. 

People went along, and we went through a whole season or two in which we did not see smiles. Even the children had their faces covered. If you desire to breathe freely, you could fully expect to be denounced by strangers for daring to reject the demands of authorities. You could get thrown off a plane, and put on a list never to travel again. The hate was apparent everywhere, even in outdoor markets where gatekeepers would sternly instruct you slap that cloth on your face. 

Those who resisted the masking demands were – like those who refused the lockdowns – regarded as miscreants and political rebels. I personally found the whole demand of masking to be so preposterous (masking has long been a sign of subservience) that I spoke out against them, only to find myself attacked viciously in many public forums as a grandma killer and a disease spreader. And this came from from venues that previously had celebrated civil liberties. 

This demand for masking was later nationalized once the Biden administration took over. It was to be 100 days of masking to defeat the virus. But by now no one believed anything coming from Washington. We knew for sure that the claim that it was only for 100 days – why 100? – was propaganda.  

It eventually took a major court case to end the mask mandate for all travel: buses, trains, and planes. Even that is still being litigated to this day, as the Biden administration claims it has the power to impose such an order by virtue of the quarantine power of the federal government, first granted in 1944. 

Looking back, the deal was pretty obvious: you can get out of lockdowns by masking. If you don’t like complying with the first round of tests, here is another test for you: comply with this and all your kvetching about lockdowns can come to an end. Just go along! What kind of pathology do you have to keep from continuing to indulge this pointlessly rebellious habit? You are probably a conspiracy theorist or QAnon or hanging around people from the radical right. 

Just do what you are told and then everything will be fine. Things are not fine because you irrationally cling to your “freedumb.”

Of course, the government broke the deal. Masking didn’t really end the restrictions. They continued on anyway. And many are still with us, even the track-and-trace surveillance and restrictions on movement. The signs that demand we socially distance still festoon airports and malls even if everyone ignores them. 

Vaccines 

“Thank goodness for the vaccines; they will end the lockdowns and the masks.”

Eventually, there came a third test of compliance. This time it was more explicit: if you don’t like lockdowns and masking, the way out is pretty simple: get the shot. If you get the shot, you can travel around freely and you can even take off your mask. This is the way we end this pandemic but there must be broad compliance. Everyone authorized to get the vaccine under the “emergency use authorization” should do it. 

New York City shut down to everyone but the vaccinated. Refuseniks could not go to restaurants, bars, theaters, libraries, or any other public house. Boston and New Orleans followed suit. The mayors said that they were keeping the city safe and reviving the economy because the only way to avoid getting Covid was to be around only vaccinated people. We were further told that the unvaccinated were prolonging the pandemic. Their patience was running thin: get the jab or lose your job. 

Many had to get it, and thousands were fired for refusing. Millions were displaced because of all this. And this only intensified the campaign, which was then extended to children. Then came the booster and the bivalent. All the while, the news concerning their effectiveness got grimmer. It did not stop transmission, thus removing all “public health” rationale behind the mandates. Moreover, it did not stop infection. You would get Covid anyway. In fact, by virtue of immunity imprinting, you could be even more vulnerable. 

The thinking behind the third hammer blow turned out to be a lie too. Your decision to surrender your bodily autonomy to the vaccine that did work did not gain back your freedom any more than the mask or the lockdowns did. All three compliance demands, each predicated on the idea that it would make the virus go away and gain back rights and liberties, turned out to be ruses of one sort or another. 

Crucially, the new demand came with the promise that if you just believe in and comply with the newest thing, the older thing that you hated will go away. So what’s the problem? Just give in to this new thing and all will be well. 

And yet the vaccine mandate was the most egregious by some measures. If lockdowns were the war, the vaccine mandate was conscription. It took hold of your own body and demanded you allow – via a needle in your skin – in a government-funded and indemnified potion about which you knew nothing. It was the equivalent of drafting young people out of their prime to kill and be killed in a foreign land, and we know how that has ended for states that have tried it: not only riots but revolutions. 

So the third test for many was the very act that flipped the switch in many people’s minds. It was a bridge too far and the act that caused millions to rethink everything about the pandemic response and their compliance all along. Even for those who went along with it, the bitterness remains and grows. 

From legend and literature, this is how things usually are presented, not with one inviting temptation to go along but rather with three chances to comply, each with assurance that all will be well if we just give up our recalcitrant desire to think and act for ourselves. At each stage, every one of us faces enormous pressure, and not just from government but also from family, friends, and coworkers. 

• “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread” ~ material comfort 
• “If You are the Son of God, throw yourself down” ~ fame and social approval
• “All these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me” ~ power 

The three tests in this case turned out to be more like the hammer blows in Mahler’s symphony, signifiers of disaster and death, in this case pertaining to our rights and liberties. 

Sure enough, even now, the remnants of all three are still with us. There are still capacity restrictions in place as remnants of the original lockdowns. Masks are still required in many cities and venues. And the vaccine mandates are still being enforced. And the pandemic emergency is still in place and will be for several more months. 

Just as one is ending, you can be sure that another is beginning. The New York Times just sounded the alarm about H5N1 bird flu, which they say could kill half of humanity if it crosses over from birds to humans. And we can be certain that the three trials will be visited upon us again. 

Have we learned? What will be our response in the next round of trials?